Many months of pixels and punctuation,

the slow archaeology of want.

You learned the terrain of my hesitation,

the latitudes where I go soft.

Then the message: we're ready.

Not a demand, but a door

left ajar in a house I'd already

walked through in my mind a couple of times.

The first hour was all nerves and wine,

the second, a grammar we invented.

No subject, no object, just the verb

of three bodies negotiating heat.

After, I lay in the valley of their breathing,

a stranger made suddenly adjacent

to the most ordinary miracle:

the unguarded face of the familiar.

The glow is real. I wear it

like a secret the room already keeps.

Not love, exactly. Something

more honest. The body, at last,

believed. The heart, for once,

not disappointed.