You set my skin on fire
and for a while,
I let the heat convince me
I was whole again.
I got lost
in the wanting,
in the closeness,
the beautiful distraction.
Later,
alone in the quiet,
I realized I’d almost forgotten
my heart was broken.
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"

★
sheepfilms
taylor price
Monterey Bay Aquarium
hello vonnie

JVL
Peter Solarz
Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
Three Goblin Art
trying on a metaphor

oozey mess
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
dirt enthusiast
we're not kids anymore.
DEAR READER
No title available

Kiana Khansmith
No title available
Misplaced Lens Cap
seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from Singapore
seen from Malaysia

seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from Russia

seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from Netherlands
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from Malaysia

seen from Canada

seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from Australia

seen from United States

seen from Türkiye
@callherwylder
You set my skin on fire
and for a while,
I let the heat convince me
I was whole again.
I got lost
in the wanting,
in the closeness,
the beautiful distraction.
Later,
alone in the quiet,
I realized I’d almost forgotten
my heart was broken.
Time didn't blur you.
It cleaned the glass.
Now I can see every crack
I once mistook for light.
I told myself I was done this time.
That I had finally learned how to live without it.
But some nights get too quiet,
and memory starts sounding like comfort.
So I answered the call again,
even knowing exactly how it ends.
Now I’m sitting with the familiar ache,
wondering why the things that ruin me
still feel the most like home.
My chest is a house after a fire,
charred beams still standing out of habit.
Everything I was is coated in that bitter ash,
that no amount of time can rinse it clean.
There is no place left inside me to start over.
I just keep finding myself at alone with the feeling,
that I was just a lie you told your friends for fun.
I am left in the aftermath,
of this burned and bruised ego,
hardly settling into the shape
of what you chose to leave me as.
And then it hits me.
Even the air tastes used,
like it belonged to you first,
and I am just breathing what you left behind.
You’ll never admit what you left behind.
How do I tell you I love you
when you’ve already turned away from the sound of it,
when the words feel like knocking
on a door you won’t open,
when loving you has nowhere left to go
but stays anyway,
quiet, and unanswered.
And then, suddenly,
you start to understand
that memory isn’t a one-way mirror.
That maybe, just maybe,
when she crosses your mind,
uninvited, undeniable,
you are crossing hers too.
“I want to be with you, it is as simple, and as complicated as that.”
— Charles Bukowski
The light hits my arm through the car window
in that same quiet, golden way
and for a second
time forgets what year it is.
The air feels familiar
like a song I don’t play anymore
but still somehow know every word to.
I pass streets that aren’t the same
but my body remembers them anyway-
the turns, the laughter,
the version of me who didn’t know
how everything would unfold
There was a woman back then.
Her voice lives somewhere in the back of warm evenings;
in the space between sunset and headlights,
where everything felt possible
and nothing needed to last.
I was younger
but not smaller
just less aware of deadlines and endings.
Now I drive with a full life beside me-
names, faces, love that stayed.
I wouldn’t trade it,
not for anything
but sometimes
the sky leans just right
the sun presses gently against my skin
and I feel it..
that old, electric ache.
Not regret,
just the quiet wish
to step back into a moment
that never knew it was a memory,
and live it one more time.
We meet in the backseat
like a secret the world isn’t ready to hear.
The windows fog until the outside disappears,
streetlights smearing into something soft and distant,
like we’ve slipped between moments instead of minutes.
Your hand finds mine
not urgent,
just certain,
like it already knows the shape of me.
We don’t say much.
We don’t have to.
There’s something about loving in small spaces
that makes everything feel larger-
breath louder, skin closer, time slower,
almost willing us to stay.
And for a while,
we exist in that parked, quiet universe
where nothing is expected of us
except to feel this.
I keep telling myself
gravity is just a theory;
that I could step outside of it
if I tried hard enough.
But you.
You are the ocean’s quiet insistence,
the way tides answer a moon
even though they never touch.
I have stood on distant shores,
hands full of other names,
other almosts,
and still felt the pull.
Like a thread stitched somewhere behind my ribs
tightening when I look away too long.
Explain to me
how something can feel like fate,
and absence at the same time.
How do you hold so much of my sky
while leaving me in the dark?
You speak in eclipses;
all shadow and alignment.
Brief moments where everything makes sense
before the light returns
like nothing happened.
And I am left here
full of your gravity,
orbiting a silence
that keeps insisting
I am nothing.
While every part of me
still moves
like you are everything.
I wish I could stand between you
and the weather of this world-
take the sharp wind in my chest
before it ever finds your skin.
I would be the quiet shore
your storms run out of strength against,
the place where waves come undone and forget their fury.
If the dark came looking,
I’d scatter light like embers in its path,
teach the night to hesitate,
to soften before it reached you.
You would not have to armor yourself here.
You would not have to brace.
I would learn the language of every hurt
just so I could answer it before it ever spoke your name.
If your name tastes unfamiliar
on your own tongue,
come home to me.
Not for answers,
not for the weight of what you could have been,
or should have been
Just come as you are,
hands full of broken glass,
heart still beating through the cracks.
I will make room for all of it.
I will hold you
like a harbor holds a storm
without asking it to be calm.
And if every door you find
feels like it might close behind you,
mine won’t.
It’s been open,
a light left on
in a house that still knows your name.
I thought I would break when it ended.
Fold in on myself,
trace your absence
like a bruise I couldn’t stop pressing.
I waited for the ache
everyone promises-
the hollow, the longing,
the slow undoing.
But nothing came.
Just quiet.
Just space where you used to be,
like a room I stopped needing
before I noticed I’d left it.
They’d say this is what it means-
that something in me is missing,
that softness skipped me,
that I’m built wrong.
Cold.
Cruel.
Maybe.
Or maybe I already grieved you
while you were still here,
learning the shape of leaving
long before you actually did.
There’s a small red circle
I keep tucked behind my ribs.
It’s not a heart,
nor anything useful,
just something that hums when it shouldn’t.
Mornings arrive like static.
I press my feet to the floor
and wait for the signal to come through,
but it flickers,
cuts out,
returns in fragments I can’t trust.
There are numbers I don’t say out loud anymore,
and a calendar full of quiet X’s
that don’t mean days passed
so much as days endured.
People ask if it’s gone yet
and I nod toward the window
like it might have slipped out
when I wasn’t looking.
But it’s still here,
in the dull glow under my skin,
in the way my body holds secrets
like a locked room
with the key bent just enough
to never turn.
If you saw it,
you’d think it was nothing.
Just a symbol.
Just a mark.
But I carry it
like a language
no one else can read,
and I’m stuck filling the pages.
You move through everything,
the quiet between tasks,
the space beside me in bed,
the seconds I thought belonged to me.
I try to shut it down,
tell myself the truth like it’s enough.
You don’t reach for me,
not in the small moments,
not in the loud ones either.
But wanting you is a tide
that keeps ignoring the shore.
I pull back, it follows.
I build distance, it fills it.
And somewhere in all of that
is the part I can’t stand.
I carry you everywhere,
heavy and constant,
while I am nowhere
inside you at all.
Frustration sits in my chest
like a slammed door that won’t stay shut.
I say I’m fine
with my jaw tight,
with my hands shaking under the table.
You tell me I’m too much.
Too loud.
Too honest.
Too emotional.
But I am tired of shrinking
so you can stay comfortable.
I am tired of apologizing
for the way my heart spills over
when it loves
or when it hurts.
If I’m intense,
it’s because I feel everything.
And I would rather burn bright
than dim myself
just to make you feel bigger.