kitties and cats

i like cats and also here to follow weird people. I’m also going through something

[catsandmittensworld]

In the soft hours of the night

her body stirs with the memory of him:

the touch of his hands,

like fire tracing the curve of her spine,

the way he spoke her name

as though it were a secret

only her skin could understand.

Her breath catches in the dark,

the silence of absence heavy on her chest,

but she dreams,

dreams of him.

His lips finding the hollow of her neck,

his heat pressing against her,

a union they once knew

but was torn apart by time's cruel hands.

In this dream

her hands ache to pull him close again,

their bodies speaking the language

they both know too well-

a language of longing and surrender.

She wakes,

her body drenched in the echoes of his touch,

and for a moment,

the world seems too cold,

too empty

without the warmth of him beside her.

In her dreams,

they are reunited,

and the world fades away,

leaving only the ache of desire

that she carries with her

until the moment when she can reach for him,

and at last,

feel him there again.

[catsandmittensworld]

I thought desire with you would be only

rough and gentle hands that soothe

the wounded, damaged animal that protects

the vulnerable flesh of a peach, easily bruised.

Now, sometimes, bitterness sits inside you

as if a broken nail swallowed,

the wounded pride of the wolf

caught in a trap from which it refuses to escape.

You become cruel in small ways.

You deride, mock, peck at my weaknesses

pulsing arrows delivered to where you know it will hurt.

Ignoring for hours, silence meant to torment,

serving a dark tide that rises like floodwater

and answers to the name jealousy.

It takes my stone wall

buffering the wind that would make me shrink

a weak tree that would bend your way

forever begging for mercy

or accepting the battering.

[catsandmittensworld]

Dawn always finds me here

kissing a good man I could never bear to wound

with the full cruelty of my desire.

Such grief comes with goodness

for he has done nothing monstrous

except not be you.

If I made love a cowardice

it is because I know happiness can destroy people too.

Still, in the early morning,

when he sleeps, with the trust of a child

I ache for an impossible life.

The one where I opened the door,

stepped into your waiting arms,

and never looked back.

[catsandmittensworld]

the poem is I'm drunk and I love you and I wish you were here to cuddle and take care of me. truly how strange that the earth continues to turn and life continues to be lived and the stars continue to shine even though we aren't physically together. don't they know? this is just the borrowed time, the painted street, a facsimile of what life could be like. that's just most of life now.

if only longing could build a bridge, if hope and desire could smooth out complications. loved too much by someone I cannot save.

[catsandmittensworld]

My life grows tired, hungry to no purpose.

I love what I do not have. You are so far.

My loathing wrestles with the slow twilights.

But night comes and starts to sing to me.

The moon turns its clockwork dream.

The biggest stars look at me with your eyes.

And as I love you, the pines in the wind

want to sing your name with their leaves of wire.

[catsandmittensworld]

He believes his pain proves depth.

Women know better. A life spent in pain

teaches you that it is different from the truth.

He thinks he could save me.

Men do not save women.

They change the architecture of the cage.

Plentiful books, heartwrenching music,

bars far enough apart to pretend it is freedom.

But sometimes another wounded body

becomes a virgin country all their own

in which to confess secrets and pretend it is the only one that exists.

[catsandmittensworld]

Tonight the distance spreads itself on the bed

like a third body, cold and uninvited.

I lie beside it and pretend

it is not winning.

Your absence has weight—

it presses on my ribs,

it rearranges the furniture of my breath.

Even the lamp seems farther away

without your voice telling the dark to behave.

I carry you in small, stubborn places:

in the sound trains make when they leave,

in the hour just before sleep

when my name forgets itself

and becomes yours.

What is love, if not this

learning the exact shape of another body

and then being asked to live

without it?

I memorize you daily

so you will not fade.

your laugh, reckless and sudden,

your silence, which knows how to stay.

The cities between us are loud,

full of clocks and neon promises,

but none of them understand

how carefully I am waiting.

My patience is an animal

that drinks only from your hands.

Come back.

Or if you cannot,

send me your ordinary hours,

your tired evenings,

your unguarded thoughts.

I will arrange them around me

like furniture, like shelter.

Until then, I sleep with the blinds open,

so the night can travel,

so maybe, by some conspiracy of stars,

the same moon touches your face

and then mine,

and for a moment

the distance forgets its job.

[catsandmittensworld]

They meet like two countries allowed one border crossing, twenty-four hours stamped onto the passport of the body.

All the clocks conspire against them. Time becomes a jealous animal, baring its teeth, circling the bed, the table, the small cup of coffee cooling between their hands.

For a day they live recklessly— touching as if touch were a language soon to be outlawed. They memorize each other the way the poor memorize bread.

Then the leaving - always the leaving - which begins hours before goodbye. Even while they kiss, absence is already packing its bags.

Afterward, the weeks stretch thin. He misses her in ordinary places: the empty side of the bed, a shirt that still smells like her yes, the silence that answers when he speaks her name. She carries him through her days like a second heart, beating stubbornly, invisibly.

Missing becomes their other life. It grows tomatoes on the windowsill, sleeps beside them, walks with them through crowds where no one knows how much love can fit inside a gap on a calendar.

Yet they endure. Because once every few weeks the world briefly makes sense again. Because one day is enough to remember that love does not need continuity— only fire, only return, only the promise that the distance, too, is part of the story they are writing with their bodies.

[catsandmittensworld]

I breathe you like salt air-

you arrive with the hush of tides

and leave me soaked with wanting.

Your shoulders, your neck, your arms

are provinces of heat.

I travel them slowly,

learning the grammar of your skin,

each muscle a verb that commands me:

stay, press closer, burn.

Your hair spills like ink across my skin

and I know love can be physical,

can sweat and tremble,

can moan without losing itself.

Every touch says: stay.

Every pause says: I choose you again.

Come closer.

Let our bodies remember

what our hearts already know.

If this is hunger, it is faithful.

If this is fire, it is a hearth.

Tonight, and every night,

I will call this love -

desire that has learned how to remain.

Wanting you in the undignified,

cracked way of earth wanting rain.

[catsandmittensworld]

I have carried your name

on my lips like a secret,

whispered between breaths,

as if the world could not understand

the depth of this love

we hide from the sun.

You are not a dalliance,

but the deep river beneath my skin

the current that runs swift and strong

a hidden promise I never thought

I would need until you came.

Your hands -

are they map I trace in the dark

leading me to places

I never knew existed.

And when your eyes meet mine

it is as if all the stars

have converged

just for us.

No one will know this love,

its weight, its taste, its fire,

but we will carry it

like two souls bound together

in a world too large to see us

and too quiet to hear us sing.

Our love is both a secret

and a song, that never ends,

whispered and sung only between us

woven into the very fabric

of the air we breathe into each other's lungs,

your pulse the only music I need.

[catsandmittensworld]

I love you.

Let me say it first,

like bread on the table before the knife.

I love you with the stubborn devotion of salt,

with the quiet rebellion of the sea

that never stops touching the shore.

That is why your pleading bruises me.

You come to me heavy with now,

your voice cracked open like ripe fruit,

asking me to tear my life from its roots

and hand it to you, still bleeding.

You say leave him

as if the world were simple,

as if love were a suitcase already packed.

I love you in stolen hours,

in the reckless light of afternoons

that know they will not last.

I love your mouth when it forgets to argue,

your hands when they are not pointing

toward an escape hatch.

When you beg,

you make my love feel like a crime scene.

You turn tenderness into testimony.

I want you standing, not kneeling-

desire is tallest when it does not crawl.

Do you know how much it costs me

to stay?

Every time I leave you,

something loyal in me limps home.

Every time you ask again,

love tightens and hurts like a beautiful shoe.

I love you

but love is not always a door flung open.

Sometimes it is a hand held still,

a choice not to shatter everything

just to prove the heart is loud.

If you love me,

love all of me,

even the part that cannot yet walk toward you,

even the woman who stays,

burning quietly,

refusing to turn devotion into ruin.

[catsandmittensworld]

Listen:

I am not a door

you can knock into becoming a road.

I am a house with windows,

and some of them are lit

for reasons older than you.

You say my name as if it were a rope.

You tug it.

You want the knot to move the mountain.

But love is not a command shouted at stone.

My fiancé sleeps in the next room of my life—

not a hero, not a villain—

a man made of mornings and shared groceries,

of plans folded carefully like shirts.

I will not burn the calendar

because you dislike the date.

You want urgency.

You want my life to spill like fruit split by heat.

But I am tired of your kneeling words,

your prayers that mistake desire for destiny.

I have loved you in the way one loves rain—

grateful, temporary, knowing the fields

do not belong to the cloud.

Do not ask the river to abandon its banks.

If you love me, stand up.

Stop begging the future to limp toward you.

Let me be the woman

who chooses her pace,

who keeps her vows and her secrets separate,

who refuses to turn love into a wound

just to prove it was real.

[catsandmittensworld]

Come back to me,

I whisper into the dark,

come back,

and let me drown

in the ocean of you again.

Let me lose myself

in the taste of your kiss

in the ache of your embrace,

in the fire that once consumed us,

and still

burns in the deepest part of me.

[catsandmittensworld]

This love is a chain made of silk and iron.

It binds her not by force,

but by the way it knows her true name.

Each link is a look not taken,

a word swallowed before it reaches daylight

a touch that lives only in memory

and therefore burns longer.

These shackles are not punishment.

They are moons clasped around the wrist

circles of vow and danger

heavy with the gravity of wanting.

The chains learn her footsteps.

They drag his absence behind her,

a hopeful corpse imitating movement.

Inside these bonds

their hearts move freely,

strong as river water

breaking stone by patience alone.

[catsandmittensworld]

Today the pain arrives early

a tide that can sense my weakness.

It brings with it the unchosen futures

the dreams still warm from your body.

Fire has always been a motif of our relationship.

At first, a patient heat:

years stacked carefully,

one faithful twig laid upon another,

trust learning how to glow without smoke.

Affection gathered-

small, bright offerings-

until the flame discovered its true hunger.

Then love forgot its borders.

What was shelter became a blaze,

with a mind of its own,

capable of turning my beloved world to ash,

capable also, terribly,

of clearing the ground for something green,

something future,

something unbearably beautiful

that could only grow

after everything familiar burned away.

I yearn and I yearn and I yearn,

the heart repeating itself,

a wave that refuses to crash and dissipate,

yet stirring the sand all the same.

I stand on the cliff, watching the vicious and inviting waves of the sea,

both too empathetic and too cowardly to jump.

It feels a little like suicide,

like I'd be killing the woman I am now.

It would be in the most painful of ways,

slitting her throat, tearing out her heart with wolf's teeth,

trapping her in a locked closet

and making her slowly burn to death.

Maybe it's more medieval than that.

Hanged, drawn, quartered, forced to gasp and almost die

before every part of her is tied to a horse

and torn away from her body in pieces.

Or flaying, her skin peeled and cut from her body,

her last hours spent in grievous pain

before death comes as a mercy.

But the other outcome at the same time

is simply relief, a body exhaling.

The ceasing of the internal fighting

to fully give up on one love

and live in the other, closing the book

that has already been read with devotion.

There's a reason a lover's embrace is a metaphor,

why arms imitate coves,

and why chests imitate shelter.

Then, perhaps, the motif would change

to cool, still, resting water in shade,

a place of peacefulness.

Where I can seek shelter from a blazing sun,

a haven only us two share

a refuge where our dreams float without burning,

[catsandmittensworld]

The affair is a shadow,

like a bird in her chest, beating its wings,

too eager, too close to escape.

In the quietest moments,

he appears,

his face carved into the curve of her thoughts,

his voice a thread pulled taut,

stretching her heart

toward a new horizon.

She has touched the edge of desire,

felt the pull of the forbidden like gravity,

and her soul yearns

wants to flee with him,

with the man who is not hers

but who holds her more than any ring ever could.

And in the depth of her yearning,

in the slant of the morning sun,

when the world is just a shade too much,

she wonders:

what would it be like

to break the glass,

to shed the promises like old skin,

and follow him

into the wild,

where the heart has no chains

and love is not a contract

but a fire

that burns away all the paths

she was meant to walk.

[catsandmittensworld]

She is engaged,

and the word follows her like a shadow

that has learned her shape by heart.

It sits beside her at the table,

answers for her when relatives ask questions,

counts the days with obedient fingers.

Yet another love lives in her -

undocumented, burning.

A man who speaks to her

as if the world were unfinished

and she were the missing line.

He wants her to run away,

loudly, softly.

He wants it the way rivers want distance,

the way matches want air.

He tells her there are lives

that do not begin with permission,

that happiness sometimes arrives

without knocking.

She listens,

and something in her loosens.

Her heart, traitorous and bright,

leans toward him like a plant

that has discovered its true sun.

With him, everything feels unnamed,

dangerous, real.

But the ring on her hand is patient.

It promises her a life that will hold,

a future arranged like furniture -

nothing sharp,

nothing sudden.

It does not ask her to leap,

only to continue.

At night she lies awake,

a woman divided into seasons.

One future breathes steadily in the other room.

The other waits outside the window,

throwing pebbles made of what if

against the glass.

She loves them both -

not equally,

not safely.

One love is a country she knows,

with laws and anniversaries.

The other is a borderless fire,

asking everything,

offering no proof it will last.

The man who wants her to run

believes love should be chosen

with the whole body,

that fear is a poor architect.

He sees her as motion,

as escape,

as a yes that has not yet learned

to say itself aloud.

She stands between lives,

holding her breath.

Not brave enough to abandon,

not strong enough to forget.

The world continues around her:

invitations sent,

plans approved,

while her heart remains elsewhere,

imagining a road

that begins with her name spoken urgently

and ends nowhere at all.

And this is her quiet tragedy:

to be loved fiercely,

to love in return,

and still walk slowly

towards a future that makes sense,

while another life-

wild, unpromised, achingly alive -

burns behind her

like a sun she will never face

without losing everything.