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

bounded by difference

I am not her guardian; I am not even her friend in any sanctioned way-just a passerby with an altar tucked into his sternum. And yet my body keeps volunteering for sacraments I was never ordained to perform. My pulse keeps kneeling. My lungs keep learning the pacing of her steps as if breath itself were a choreography meant to match her.

All I can do is make her happy for a moment in school. I pass her a joke folded into paper; I lend her a pen; I make way in a crowded hall and pretend it's nothing. I rehearse humility like a shield. Because anything larger would be theft. Anything louder would be a storm. I will not be a storm to her. I will be weathered light.

She does not know.
She cannot know.
And still-my silence grows seasons; my chest, a garden nobody visits, bearing fruit that falls and feeds nothing. This is what devotion looks like when it refuses to trespass.

Dearest one, forgive the audacity of these pages. I have no right to write you into eternity. Yet see how the words insist? See how they gather at the edges like people at windows during rain? I cannot keep them from forming your name in their mouths. Even when I refuse letters, the spaces between them line up to resemble you.

If I could choose a gentler obsession, I would. If I could trade this orchestral ache for a hum, I would. But love arrives at the volume it wants. Mine arrived trembling and tender and terrible. It arranged the furniture of my soul toward you and locked the wheels.

I have tried to reason with it: She is tired-don't trouble her. She is brilliant-don't weigh her. She is sweet-don't draw from sweetness like a well. And love says: I will sit here quietly then. I will be the light under the door. I will not knock. I will simply be.

So I let it be. And in letting it be, I am unmade and remade in the same hour.

There is a particular way her name fits inside thought: as if it were designed not to be spoken but held. There is a love that shows itself with trumpets; mine travels with soft shoes. There is a love that builds scaffolds; mine leaves flowers where no one will find them. There is a love that demands to be seen; mine prays to remain invisible if that keeps her safe.

I confess to the cosmos what I cannot confess to her: I would learn her tremor like a language. I would write my steadiness into her palms. I would exchange my cheap sleep for her good sleep. I would tithe my years to her rest. It is impossible, and I will not say it aloud, but impossibilities still glow when thought passes near them.

When I see her yawn quietly and smile anyway, I feel a familiar blasphemy bloom: I want to revise reality. I want to pick up the pen that writes days and correct the cruelty out of them. I want to return to the storehouse of sorrows and misfile hers under never mind. But I am mortal, and that is not my ledger. So I do smaller things. I do human things. I practice the almosts and the maybes. I carry water to a fire that is also my heart.

She does not know.
She cannot know.
And yet, in not-knowing, she is mercifully free of me. This is my consolation: her story is not bent by my ache. My love cannot burden her because my love refuses to arrive.

There was once a faith in me that burned blue and loud. Then there was the aftermath, where ashes arranged themselves into the silhouette of who I used to be. I made a home in the chill. I called numbness maturity because it survived so well. I told myself I had graduated from needing anything.

Her laugh changed my diploma back into paper.

Do you see how small the miracle is? Not thunder, not prophecy-a laugh. Half a second on a Tuesday in a hallway that doesn't deserve her. She made an ordinary place forget its name. This is how I measure the sacred now: by the radius of her unnoticed transfigurations.