Do you hear it-
or has it always lived inside the walls of your ribs,
pretending it was yours alone?
Two bodies, yes,
but that’s what language calls us
when it needs the impossible to feel simple.
In truth, we are something harder to separate-
like ink dropped into water
before it decides where to belong.
Our hearts don’t beat.
They argue in rhythm.
They collide beneath skin like locked machinery,
like two clocks in the same room
refusing the same idea of time.
I swear the bass in our chests is not sound-
it is pressure.
It is the ocean remembering it was once sky,
folding inward instead of outward,
drowning what it was meant to hold.
Sometimes I think we were not born-
we were assembled incorrectly,
stitched together in the dark
by hands that forgot where one person ends
and the next begins.
That’s why I can feel you even when you’re silent.
Not presence-just pressure.
Like your outline has pressed itself into my bones
and refused to leave a clean edge behind.
When I breathe, it feels borrowed.
Like air passes through me first
before deciding whether it will stay.
Like I am only a hallway
for something larger moving through.
And you-
you don’t walk through the world so much as
tilt it slightly off balance.
Streetlights flicker when you think too loudly.
Shadows lean in just to listen.
Even mirrors hesitate
before deciding which of us they’re meant to show.
We were never two, I think-
not in the way language understands it.
Just a single mistake split into motion
so it could learn loneliness
from both directions at once.
And still-
the worst part is not the merging,
not the way we blur at the edges
like wet paint refusing to choose form.
It’s how natural it feels
when the rhythm finally syncs,
when the chaos in our chests
pretends it was always music
and not something trying to escape.
Tell me-
if we are one soul locked inside two bodies,
who gets to remain
when the lock finally turns?