Two languages colliding:

your body’s rough syntax, my heart’s messy grammar.

Both saying: stay. Stay for what comes next.

Stay for the way light bends through my blinds at dusk,

for the heat caught between our skin and my sheets,

for the dull ache that lingers a bit longer than it should,

the kind you stop noticing until it starts to hurt again.

We write stories for each other in fingerprints and salt,

we rewrite them in the dark when neither of us is watching the other,

both pretending we don’t know how this ends.

But you’re always there, in the moments where everything stops—

your hands, my voice, time holding its own breath,

the seconds bending, mutating in on themselves,

each one stretching out too far and never far enough.

Your touch becomes my punctuation.

It stills me. It undoes me.

A comma, a pause, a breath caught on the edge

of something I can’t bring myself to name.

Some nights, it feels like prayer,

your fingertips moving slow, deliberate,

writing psalms into my ribs I’ll never learn how to sing.

I answer with silence and half-finished sonnets,

my voice breaking at the edges where your touch hit the deepest.

Time seems to disappear when we’re like this,

minutes dripping heavy as a bee’s honey,

seeping through the roots of this budding bond you swear doesn’t exist,

sticking to my skin long after the room goes quiet from your departure.

We would meet in translations,

your touch decoding my words,

my breath catching on the poetry

you carved into my spine without permission.

In those serene moments, it’s like time forgot how to move forward.

Those seconds hang like clothes on a line,

damp with the things that are left unsaid between us,

flailing in the wind through the debris either is too afraid to clean up.

We fill the silence with weight: your hands anchored to your phone, mine on my mouse.

Both waiting for the other to break, longing for the tension in the room to give.

And yet, you stayed. You linger like a familiar ache,

the kind I stopped feeling long ago,

the kind that feels like home if I held onto it a bit longer.

Time slows here. Time always bends.

Time swells with the kind of passion that doesn’t fade.

It permeates, latching itself into us,

until all that’s left is the tension of anticipation.

You decide to stay there too, in the pause between my words,

in the low hum of your breath pressed against mine—

unwritten stories caught in the space between touch and voice,

waiting for an ending that never quite seems to arrive.

But you’ll always be here, won’t you? Always.

In the moments where everything stops,

in the limbo of time holding its own breath,

your hands, my voice—the air too thick to carry what we need.

Your touch has become my punctuation.

A comma where I thought there’d be a period.

A path I never meant to take.

It stills me. It threatens to undo me.

So, in every pause, we still linger in limbo,

hostages until time remembers how to let us go.