I pull the air from your lungs,
and you cannot exhale.
It hangs,
like the distance between stars—
a gap you can’t touch,
a void you can only picture.
Its shape is starting
to form in your mind.
The human body—
thirty-seven trillion cells—
each a world,
countless beings
reaching for what keeps moving,
a thread suspended
just out of grasp.
There are billions of you,
and I am not among them,
and you understand.
You wonder how far we’ve drifted,
how far the breath traveled
before it reached you,
caught in this space—
between desire
and the unsaid.
I move through you
like time does,
pressed against the belly
of a silent truth.
You feel it—
beneath your ribs, beneath your skin.
You don’t move.
You search for me in the stars,
but the stars don’t matter—
it’s the darkness between them
that houses your hunger.
I won’t show you
all of it,
but you recognize it
in how you move toward me—
in how you don’t turn away.
These galaxies
don’t need light.
They exist
between us,
like minds meeting
before thought takes shape,
before we name
it.
We move toward each other,
by the pull
of what’s older,
what has always burned
in the quiet tension
between selves.
