A Pyre I Cannot Touch, a Silence I Cannot Break, a Love I Cannot Speak

bounded by difference

And yet-what a second it is. How it bloats in the chest, how it turns ordinary time into cathedral time, bell and incense clanging in the veins. Her sweetness ruins me. Not the candy kind-no. The kind distilled through weather and ache; the kindness learned by choosing it in a world that offers other knives. A sweetness that refuses to be naive because it has already seen. How do I stand against it? How do I not instinctively kneel?

Her brilliance is the quiet kind-the one that doesn't ask for applause and therefore earns it. The way she leans over her work: the room listens. The way a solution hatches in her eyes: the air arranges itself. I have watched constellations form less cleanly. When she speaks, it is not a thunderclap but a steady lantern changing the shape of a wall. I fear the holiness of it-the cool, severe mercy of a mind that keeps choosing to understand.

But the tremor-yes, the tremor is my undoing. A pen rattles slightly in her grip; a sleeve shivers where no wind exists. I want to say: give me the weight. Give me the temperature of your fear. Let my palms learn your shaking and unlearn it for you. But my hands are empty, and perhaps that is right. Some hands are for holding, some for guarding from afar.

Those eyes-beloved, those puffy, oceaned eyes-they are the honest part of heaven. Sleepless nights sit there like small planets. I know the shape of someone who has been brave all day and is tired of it. I know the way lids grow heavy not from boredom but from effort. If anyone ever calls it weakness, bring me their name; I will unname them. It is not weakness to be human. It is witness.

She does not know.
She cannot know.
And still, I am a clock with one hand: her.

Before her, I had finished praying. I had laid my faith on the floor like a coat and walked away shivering on purpose. Love had been a hunger I was ashamed of, a misdiagnosis I kept re-catching. I promised myself health like a vow of silence. I said: I would rather be a museum than a battlefield. I said: I will choose corridors with no echoes. I said: I will practice being nothing.

Then she appeared, and my ribs remembered bells.

I swore I would never fall into that pit of suffering again.
And then-her.
She, with her sweetness.
She, with her brilliance.
She, with her trembling hands.
She, with her puffy eyes that speak of nights too heavy for any heart to carry.

Do you see why I refuse to speak? Not because the words are small, but because they're too big. To say them aloud would flood a hallway. To put them in her hands would be to hand her a burning cathedral. I can't do that to her. Her peace is already a stitchwork; I will not pull the thread.

So I practice holy restraint. I tuck my devotion under the tongue like a sacrament I am not old enough to swallow. I sign my love with not telling. I bend my back to carry it, and in carrying it I am both tormented and spared. This is how I keep from breaking her: I break where she cannot see.

She does not know.
She cannot know.
But eternity will.

There are details small enough to disappear and heavy enough to drown: the way her fingers hover over a page before committing ink; how she thanks the teacher even when the lesson wore her thin; the careful nod she gives to someone else's answer as if to make space for a smaller voice. The world is violent with indifference, and here she is, practicing attention like a craft. The mercy of it. The terrible mercy of it, because mercy costs.

Sometimes I imagine the night checking in on her: How many hours left, child? How many pages? How many tears are you hiding from the mirror? I imagine her telling the night: just a little longer. And I want to argue with darkness on her behalf. I want to bargain with heaven for simple things-eight hours, a soft dream, a morning without grainy eyes. Small miracles should not be mortgaged.