pulse work
to really care, and still pour from an empty cup. not because i am generous, but because my body does not know how to stop. the chest tightens, the throat burns, the hands keep reaching anyway. i feel everything fully, recklessly. i count each breath like it owes me something. every pulse is loud. alive. almost violent in how much it wants to stay.
to know someone beyond their favorite color. to learn the texture of their silence. to notice where their pain lives before they name it. to make time for that kind of knowing. the slow kind. the kind that sinks under the skin and refuses to leave. sometimes we lose each other in the same sentence, still sharing air, still standing too close, pretending this isn’t already breaking.
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there is a feeling i have been carrying for three years now. reshaped, bent, diced, fried over and over by time and circumstance. crooked, yes. uneven. but somehow it mended itself. badly stitched, but intact. still warm. still beating. i don’t know in which timeline we were meant to meet, or if there was ever a version of us that could exist beyond what ifs and private fantasies. some doors never open, yet their outlines stay burned into the wall.
years pass, but certain feelings refuse to evolve. they stay exactly where they were left. same smell. same weight. like my favorite blanket, worn thin but impossible to throw away. it’s the same song we played until the player broke, until the sound warped, until silence came not because we were done, but because there was nothing left to spin.
love is and was. love is not clean. it is the instinct to protect what you already know is leaving too soon. it is choosing to bury something deep instead of displaying it gently. it is swallowing what you once spit out in self defense. it is licking back what was contaminated, knowing the risk, knowing the damage, and doing it anyway.
love lives in the body first. in the ache, in the adrenaline, in the quiet brutality of staying soft when hardness would be easier. it is irrational. it is loyal to a fault. it does not ask permission. it just happens, and you deal with the aftermath later, alone, breathing, still alive.
