Lilac hush
earth, half-waking,
baroque birdsong.

Moss curls ,
dew beads on nettle’s tongue
small, glassy prayers.

wind
silk-handed seamstress
stitches light into every leaf,
veiling the world
breath and bloom.

Bones of old trees cradle the sun’s milk,
wildflowers nestle in their ribs
what dies here, lives softer.

river, translucent and slow,
spills silver veins , the skin of the valley
a quiet pulse beneath the green.

Somewhere between sky and soil,
we become the silence
lungs folding into pollen-laden air,
fingertips brushing the hem of forever.

Nothing belongs.
Nothing is apart.

In the meantime,
the world remakes itself
petal by petal, wing by wing
and we, fragile passengers,
are simply learning how to listen.

I stood in the hallway,
the familiar scent of jasmine hanging heavy—
my mother’s perfume.

I called her name,
but it wasn’t the voice of my mother
that answered.

It was mine—
but younger.

I turned the corner,
and there she was—
sitting at the kitchen table,
but her eyes…
they weren’t hers anymore.

"I’ve waited for you,"
she whispered,
and the room went cold.

I reached for her,
but my fingers sank into her skin—
soft, pliable,
like wax—
too easy.

And I realized too late—
she wasn’t waiting for me.
She was pulling me in.

Then I felt it—
a slow, unbearable pressure in my chest.
I couldn’t breathe.

"You’ll never leave me again."

He arrived ,
fire-tongued
wings lacquered in sunlight,
like a breath the garden forgot to exhale
green burning against green.

I was a child
with small hands that believed
giving was enough
to make something stay.

I fed him,
chilies plucked from the crooked vines
my father planted
bright little tongues,
burning red,
barely ripened,
all I had.

He bit me,
a clean puncture,
as if to say:

Love is no debt I owe you.

Blood welled up,
startling, hot,
the first truth nature ever gave me.

I stood there crying
while he finished the offering,
then flew away,
lighter.

What child understands hunger
until it pierces skin?

The next day,
I was waiting,
small hands trembling again,
opening as if the bite
had never happened.

Gold seeps like marrow,
stars bruise against the void.
"Light is starving," he mutters,
"even the sun feasts on its own fire."

Frost exhales—
a slow, deliberate frostbite.
"Light is a path,"he murmurs,
"but men mistake fire for direction—"
"they burn chasing it."

Emily lingers, a moth in lace,
wings dusted in ruin.
"And yet, all paths end the same—"
"a mouthful of quiet, a bed of hush."

Vincent laughs—ochre-stained teeth,
lips split with fevered art.
"Silence is blue," he whispers,
"a drowning, gasping blue—"
"the color of voices suffocated in paint."

Ruskin presses a palm to the glass,
watching years soften like ink in water.
"No, silence is the color of old hills—"
"of books breathing dust in rooms left untouched."

Emily smirks.
"Ah, but death is an artist too—"
"it sketches men into whispers, steals them like dust in light."

Vincent exhales, trembling.
"Then let it take me in color."
"Let me vanish in thick strokes—"
"golden, breathless, eternal."

Frost watches shadows stretch long.
"Some men vanish in quieter ways—"
"no fire, no frenzy—just the hush of winter."

Ruskin traces ivy creeping over forgotten doors.
"Some men vanish like abandoned houses—"
"sinking soft into time’s arms."

Emily tilts her head, voice a half-buried secret.
"Perhaps eternity is not silence—"
"but the echo of a name no one dares to speak."

I have taken the flowers.
Ripped them from the light,
peeled their bright faces back
like something skinned alive.

They did not scream.
They only folded—
like lungs emptied of air,
like mouths pried open
with nothing left to say.

O, love is a quiet violence.
A hand that plucks.
A hand that presses.
A weight that does not crush—
only keeps.

Here, a lilac curls,
like a severed breath.
Here, a daisy chokes on dust.
Here, a rose—veins milk-white,
mouth frozen in a paper-thin hush—
a relic of something that once burned.

And tell me, do they still remember?
The wind that kissed them last,
the trembling hands that held too tight,
or only the silence left behind?

I listen—
ear to time’s brittle ribs,
to the breath of pressed petals,
to the ruin love leaves in its wake.

And somewhere,
in the marrow of silence,
I swear I hear them—

whisper back.

Summer belonged to the mangoes first—
golden, sun-fat, splitting at the seams,
dripping down wrists, pooling in the hollows
of our hands— a crime scene of sweetness.

We ate without caution,
let the sugar gloss our lips,
let the gold run—drip, smear,
something like hunger, something like greed.

Your mother hated the mess.
Scrubbed your fingers raw,
tut-tutted about sticky floors,
the bad habits ripening in you.

But mine—mine only laughed,
pressed my palms between hers,
kissed the sugared wounds like an oath,
said, let some things be wild, love.

That summer, we outran the heat,
split the dusk with our honey-lunged laughter,
left fingerprints gilded in the sun.

And when I told my grandfather I liked mangoes,
he arrived the next morning with a whole harvest,
grinning like he had outwitted the season itself.

My mother still laughs,
but I scrub my hands clean now.

Some things stain.
Some things don’t.

Soft-spined hush—
wildflowers unfasten,
unravel in amber hush.

Morning spills,
sapphire- limned, breath-held.

Fingertips trace time-etched veins;
branches sway, unbroken
a hymn of fracture,
a lattice of hush.

By the river,
silver-throated, dreaming forward,
a shimmer of lost echoes.
Even water aches for direction.

Sky bleeds gold through splintered boughs.
Light pools in murmurs,
anointing restless roots.

Becoming is a quiet rupture.

And here—
where petals ghost against skin,
where rivers hum secrets through silence,
I learn:

Love is neither river nor root.
It is the sun,
burning quiet within.

Love is a tide,
soft, inevitable,
etching names into sand.

But understanding,
the moon’s hush pull.

To be held is one thing.
To be known—shadows cradled,
no flinch, no turning away.

That is love, not by default,
but by choice.