When you loved me,
the world paused its rotation,
like even time
knew not to interrupt.
Everything else faded,
noise, doubt,
the version of me
before there was you.

You looked at me
like I was an oasis
in your endless desert.
Like your whole life
had led you here,
and now that you’d found me,
you could finally rest.

You didn’t love me gently.
You loved me like revelation.
Like touching me
meant risking everything,
but you’d already decided
I was worth the scars.

You saw in me
something untouched,
unguarded, and fragile.
A truth not curated,
not shaped by the world.
But the part of me
still soft,
still pure.

And instead of rushing toward it
to claim or change it,
you stood there,
stunned.
Like you didn’t know
whether to protect it
or fall to your knees in hunger.

You held me like I was made
of breath and glass,
something holy and fleeting.
You wanted to wrap your whole being around mine,
not just with desire,
but with devotion.

And still,
there was craving.
There was hunger.

The kind that doesn’t want to consume
to destroy,
but to understand.
To merge.
To belong.
To be lost in another.

And I…
I had never felt more real
than when I was against you.
Never more known
than in the way
you almost trembled
just to be near me.

That kind of love
needs forever
just to make sense of.
It arrives wild,
sets fire to everything you were,
and leaves you standing
in the ruins of unanswered questions.

And now,
no one says my name
with the weight
your voice gave it.
No one looks at me
like I’m both salvation
and temptation.

And maybe that’s a mercy.
Because what if…
I don’t miss you.
I miss being
unforgettable.

. (or: when I heard my voice come from his mouth) .

At first, it was flattery—
the way he wore his collar the same way I do,
the way he started lighting my brand of cigarettes,
the way his laugh hit the same register
I used to throw like a knife across rooms.

I caught him reading my journal once—
not with guilt, but reverence.
“I like the way your thoughts bleed,”
he said, closing the leather cover like scripture.

He stopped asking me questions.
He already knew the answers.

My shirts disappeared one by one.
Then my habits.
Then my silences.

I watched him pour bourbon
with the same three-count I perfected in 1994.
Watched him cross his legs just so,
quote my warnings back to me
as if they were lessons he taught himself.

He ****** me like a rehearsal.
And I let him—God help me—
because some part of me believed
that to be repeated is to be remembered.

But memory is a shallow grave.

One night,
he answered the phone with my cadence.

“This is he,” he said—
voice dry as an autumn branch.
And for a second,
even I believed him.

I didn’t confront him.
I just started talking less.

He filled the air like a flood.
My presence became parentheses.

In bed,
he started calling me old man—
not as a kink,
but as a countdown.

I smiled.
But it tasted like rust.

The boy I devoured
was digesting me back.

And prophecy, that silent ******,
licked its lips
and kept watching.