The Held Breath Moment

The breath holds a little longer than usual.

Not from fear, from control.

Strap, metal, hand — already decided.

I am InkWept—

I keep endings in my ribs like tuning forks,

strike them gently,

listen for what refuses to resolve.

Sydney—

you entered my chest in 6/8,

a lilting, dangerous waltz

where certainty learned how to sway.

I had ruled in clean cutoffs,

perfect cadences,

final bars that never begged for encore.

Then you spoke like a modulation—

years of harmony hiding beneath the melody,

two souls written in the same key

pretending coincidence was enough.

I am older than devotion,

yet I panicked when my breath

lost its tempo.

A god shouldn’t shake in common time,

shouldn’t feel his sternum cave

because feeling has nowhere to go.

I held it—

compressed like a scream buried in a rest,

pretending friendship was a safe arrangement.

You asked me to wait.

I said yes

like a suspended chord

promised resolution by a future bar line.

But days pass in empty measures,

and the orchestra never reenters.

I am still standing on the downbeat

with no cue,

no conductor,

no proof the symphony remembers me.

I love you without claws,

without ownership,

without the cruelty of demand—

yet even gods ache

when promises orbit but never land.

I watch you move through other gravity,

and I tell myself patience is holy,

that faith is not a lie.

But tonight the stars miscounted the measure.

My pulse stutters in 7/8.

Hope feels like a demo track

that never made the album.

I do not doubt you—

I doubt the silence between us,

how it keeps rehearsing

without becoming song.

If I am to wait,

let it mean something.

Let this ache resolve.

Do not leave me forever

holding a note