#iwtim

December

- the month of lovers,

soulmates, deep connections.

exhausted beyond words and feelings

pain no longer startles me

you place another winter in my hands

and I don't flinch,

only wonder

why faith still breathes in me...?

As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.

Virginia Woolf

This isn't a horror, but a story of pain and madness, woven with melancholy and despair over lost hope.

He was wicked and deformed, only in human form, he was a monster, even though he didn't look like one at all.

There was something uglier and painful beneath the veil of beauty.

Oh, to be forgotten, that's all she ever wanted.

They asked me what I preferred, a good hug or a good kiss? I replied, books, I prefer good books.

I am bitter tea,

steeped until the water turns almost black,

until the truth bleeds out of the leaves

and stains everything it touches

No honey waits for you here,

No milk to blur the edge of my colour

I come to you naked in the cup,

steam rising like a confession

I will not soften

You lift me to your lips,

and hesitate

Truth has a smell you recognize

sharp, bitter,

too close to the bone

You reach for sugar the way others reach for prayer,

the way one reaches for skin in the dark

to avoid looking at their own reflection

You say you love me,

but what you love is the version of me

that dissolves easily,

that sweetens under pressure,

that learns how to behave on your tongue

When the truth hurts your eyes,

you look away

You call it imagination,

hope,

romance,

you call it kindness

But I feel you rearranging me

adding spices to my silence,

projecting softness where I have chosen steel,

touching me as though I might break

if you saw me clearly

I watch myself disappear

beneath your careful stirring

Your spoon clinks against the cup,

metal on porcelain,

desire or denial?

and with every slow circle

you love me further away from myself

Still, I want you

This is the dark miracle

I want the warmth of your hands

around the cup that holds me

I want your mouth to learn

the language of bitterness,

to let it spread,

to let it linger,

to feel how depth opens slowly

like a bruise,

like a kiss that leaves a mark

you can’t explain

And you want me

not the comfort,

but the fire

You want to drink something

that does not forgive easily,

that asks you to stay present,

that will not flatter you into safety

So we sit together in the low light,

knees touching under the table,

truth and sweetness breathing the same air

You set the sugar down,

fingers trembling slightly

I let the steam cool,

just enough not to burn you

We do not change each other

We risk understanding

You take a sip

slow, deliberate,

and I watch your face

as the bitterness opens,

as it cuts and deepens

and finally blooms

I allow one drop of honey

not to hide myself,

not to become what I am not,

but to meet you

in the narrow space

where love learns restraint

The tea remains dark,

strong,

full of unspeakable depth

And so do we,

two ways of seeing,

two hungers circling the same cup,

learning that intimacy is not sweetness,

nor brutality,

but the courage to taste each other

without turning away.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

There is a field. I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

The world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase each other

Doesn't make any sense.

Rumi