she rests her chin on my chest
as we lay naked
beneath sheets
knotted by affection.

the moonlight filters like silver tresses
through the blinds
on this cloudless night,
illuminating tears quivering
in the corners of cold brew nitro eyes.

as her fingers twirl
in the brambles of my beard,
she whispers, “the scars i wear
are the wounds
i carry inside.”

i push my lips against the angry stripes
in the crook of her elbow. she winces.
grits her teeth. the scars have hardly healed.
i brush my hand across her cheek
and speak truth—meager as candlelight,
but maybe enough to swallow the shadows
playing tricks inside her mind.

in forgotten eons long before
our sun was forged,
the molecules that would conspire
to give you form were born in the cores
of super giants. those same cells
floated through chasms of space-time—
billions of years—to this very moment:
with you and i entwined beneath the gaze
of a cosmos lightyears beyond.

nebulae watched, powerless,
as you suffered in a black hole
of oppression, desperate to aid,
but paralyzed by distance
and the entropy of time.

but they did not stay idle.
like some whisper of the divine,
i find some solace in the fact that somehow
dying stars put us on this planet
at the same time, almost
as if we were two photons
in perfect orbit.

for, while dying gods
couldnʼt reach out to save you,
the stars have converged
and our paths overlap.

some wounds may never heal, Beloved.
old hurts often refuse to lose their ache.
i cannot save you from the inhumanity
youʼve suffered. i cannot erase your pain.

but i can lie by your side
and ease your anxiety,
hold your body close to mine
solidarity, forever—
endlessly intertwined.