Paul de Spijker

Photos of ordinary men, short stories, reflections, poems, and quotes. Welcome To My World

[pauldespijker]

Under the Light of the Window Frames

The phone call came very early for a Saturday. The light was still thin, barely more than a gray suggestion along the edges of the curtains, and the city lay far away, muffled, as if Amsterdam were sleeping at the bottom of a lake. I had not heard his name in so long that for a moment I thought I had misunderstood. But it was his sister, her voice too small for what it carried, and she said my name as if she didn’t need to say anything else afterward.

She was right. She didn’t need to say anything else.

I stayed lying there. The sheet felt cool against my skin. Outside, a tram leaned into the bend of the Prinsengracht, that familiar metallic hum I had always heard without really listening, and now I could think of nothing else. The city that kept going. The wheels on the rails. The impossible ordinary.

Floriaan. I spoke his name out loud, softly, in the empty apartment. To feel whether he still existed somewhere. Whether there was still a place where the sound of him could live.

I had known him for almost ten years. We had found each other the way men like us usually do: carefully, sideways, through a friend who meant well and pushed too hard. I remember the first evening, a terrace in the Jordaan, the late September light orange and black in the windows across the street. He sat diagonally opposite me and listened more than he spoke, which was rare, and I felt his attention like something solid. A hand that did not touch me but was still there.

After that we spent a lot of time together in the city. That is perhaps the simplest way to say it, but it is not entirely accurate. We walked through the Jordaan on evenings when the cobblestones still held the warmth of the day beneath our feet. We stood on little bridges and looked at the water without saying anything that mattered. We drank beer on the sidewalk with friends and he would laugh then, his head slightly tilted, as if he were observing the conversation from a distance, as if he always stood just outside the center and wanted it exactly that way.

I learned his body without ever fully understanding it. The width of his shoulders. The way he used his hands when he explained something. A scar on his forearm that he never explained, and I never asked, because there were things we both guarded with silence.

That first week after the phone call, I walked. Not to get anywhere, but to escape the stillness. I followed the canals without a plan, looked at my reflection in the water that was always moving, never giving me back completely. The city was brutal in its indifference. Bicycles whizzed past my elbow. People carried flowers, groceries, children on their shoulders. A drunk Englishman laughed so loudly he had to hold on to a lamppost. I stood there like someone looking into a shop window from the street.

It was the fragments that haunted me. Not the great loss, that was too big to grasp, but the loose pieces that suddenly surfaced without warning. The smell of stagnant water and the memory of a bridge where we had stood waiting in the rain, his shoulder against mine. His voice when he explained something he wasn’t sure about himself, that hesitation in it, that willingness not to know. His hand on my shoulder the evening I told him I also fell for men, and how he said nothing, only nodded, and how that nod was worth more than all the words.

But I kept returning to one evening. Over and over, like a record needle falling back into the same groove.

It had been late summer. One of those nights when the heat only loosens after midnight, slow and reluctant, and the city smells of warm brick. We sat on the flat roof of his apartment, reached through a trapdoor he had secretly opened, not officially allowed but never checked. Amsterdam lay stretched out beneath us like a body at rest. The canals glittered. Somewhere in the Pijp a man was singing a drunkard’s song, faint and too far away to make out the words.

He had pulled off his T-shirt and laid it beside him. That was all: a gesture without meaning, just the heat, just comfort. But I saw the line of his back, the hollow above his hip, the play of light and shadow on his skin as he breathed slowly, and something in me grew quiet.

I had seen him without a shirt before. This was different.

We lay next to each other on the warm roofing, my arm almost against his, the heat of his skin noticeable without touch. There was a kind of tension in the air that had nothing to do with a storm, though the sky in the south bulged heavy and dark. I smelled his sweat, his skin, something warm and real that almost broke me in a certain way.

“Do you think it ever gets easier?” he asked.

His voice was low, on the border between sleepiness and seriousness. I turned my head toward him. He was staring up at a plane drifting slowly across the sky, its red light blinking like a question.

“What do you mean?”

“This.” He shrugged, but there was a tension in the movement that said the opposite. “Saying who you are. Without it immediately changing everything.”

I wanted to say something reassuring. But I didn’t know that certainty. “Maybe,” I said finally. “Or maybe it becomes less important.”

He laughed softly, a sound that stayed low, almost to himself. “That sounds like someone who has already accepted it a little.”

I didn’t know if that was true. I only knew that in the warmth of that night, with the city beneath us and his body next to mine, there was no place on earth I would rather be.

My hand moved. So simple, so inevitable. My fingers touched his, a barely noticeable contact, and he didn’t pull away. His hand turned over and his fingers closed around mine, firm, without hesitation, as if he had been waiting. I felt the pressure of his palm, its warmth, the small imperfections of his skin.

We said nothing more. His thumb moved over my knuckles, back and forth, slowly and without hurry, an endless repetition that loosened something in my chest. The city breathed beneath us. Somewhere a boat engine, far away. The blinking light of the plane disappeared behind a cloud.

I could have kissed him. It would have been so simple. Turning my head toward him, bridging the distance that wasn’t large. I felt in everything that he would have allowed it. Maybe more than that. But I lay still, caught in my own hesitation, afraid to change the quality of this moment, to disturb this balance that was so fragile and so exactly right.

And so we stayed lying there, until the night cooled and we went inside without many words.

His sister called a week later. My name was in his phone, she said, and she thought I might want to pick up some things. She barely knew me. The fact that he had kept my name, somewhere in the small memory of his life, was already more than I had expected.

The stairwell smelled of cleaning product. The smell did something to my knees. I took the steps slowly, my hand on the railing, and tried not to think about how many times I had climbed this staircase without thinking about it.

His door stood ajar.

Inside was the silence of someone who was no longer there. Not the silence of absence, but the silence of a presence that had stopped. His coat still hung on the hook. A glass on the table, with a thin line of dust along the rim. A book on the couch, open and spine up, like a bird with broken wings.

I walked around without touching anything. My eyes moved over his belongings, looking for something I couldn’t name. A letter, an explanation, a sign. The room was smaller than I remembered, or maybe the emptiness made it smaller.

Under his bed, not hidden but casually placed, I found a box.

Photos. Loose papers. Concert tickets. My hands moved slowly through the contents, as if every movement could disturb something. And then: a photo of the two of us on that roof.

We lay next to each other, our faces half-squinting in the light, our heads close together. Our hands intertwined, clearly visible, captured by someone who had seen it and said nothing about it. I had not known that anyone had photographed us. I had thought that night belonged only to us.

I sat down on the floor.

My fingers traced the contours of our bodies on the glossy paper. His arm. My hand. What lay between us, visible and real.

Under the photo, folded once, lay a note. Small handwriting, hurried, slanting slightly to the right.

Paul

I don’t know how to say this without ruining everything. Maybe that’s also why I never said it out loud. With you it feels different. Calmer. As if for a moment I don’t have to fight.

I’m afraid that if I speak it, it will disappear. Or that you will disappear.

But it’s already there. You know that too.

I’m sorry that I’m always quiet.

Floriaan.

I read it several times. Each time again, as if the words might shift, might have a different meaning if I read them from another angle. But they stayed the same. So simple and so irreparable.

My throat was dry. My chest felt tight, full, as if something were pushing against the inside that was too big to contain. I thought of that night on the roof. Of his hand around mine. Of the space I had left between what I felt and what I did.

I could have turned around. I could have said his name. I could have begun.

The anger came first, fast and hot. At him, because he had waited. At myself, because I had done the same. But the anger had no foundation. Beneath it lay something else, softer and much heavier. Something that had no name but had always been there, in the way I had looked at him when he wasn’t looking, in the way I had remembered his voice while pretending I wasn’t.

I sat down on his bed. The sheet was cool, smooth, without imprints. I laid my hand flat on the fabric and thought of nothing, or of everything at once; it is hard to say where the difference lay.

The sun had climbed higher and now fell in slanted beams through the window. Dust particles danced in the light, visible and ungraspable, present and already vanishing. I held the note in my hand and felt how something in me shifted irrevocably. Not like a break. More like a settling, deep and slow, the way the ground of this city has always moved.

At the window I stood still for a long time.

Outside, a tourist boat glided through the canal, people on board with beer cans in their hands, laughter carrying over the water. Life, untouchable in its ordinary progression, without pause, without mercy.

I pressed my forehead against the glass. Cooler than I had expected.

“It was already there,” I said. Not to him, because he could not answer. More to the room, the dust particles, the light. To the space he had left behind and that I now filled for a moment with my presence.

My hand closed around the note. Not to hold it. To be carried by it. The tear that rolled down my cheek I only noticed later.

Outside the sky had cleared. The city lay sharp in the afternoon light, every detail clear: the facades, the bicycles, the trees already beginning to shed their leaves. I walked without hurry, my pace even, along the canal. An old man with a small dog nodded to me. I nodded back.

Floriaan is no longer here. That does not change.

But sometimes, when the light falls through a window in a certain way and the city briefly holds its breath between two sounds, I still feel the pressure of his hand around mine. His thumb moving slowly over my skin. The warmth of a summer night above the city.

Not as something that wants to return. As something that was always there. As something that truly happened, in a world that continued without knowing what was being held on that roof.

There, exactly in that space between what was said and what was not, he still lies next to me. And I hold his hand. And this time I do not let go.

[pauldespijker]

[pauldespijker]

See the bowtie? I wear it and I don't care. That's why it's cool.

[pauldespijker]

Like Warmth That Has Nowhere to Go

The warmth was still rising from the asphalt when I first really saw him. Not the way you see someone when you pass by, but truly: as a figure that took up space, that had weight. The day refused to disappear. Behind the sports hall hung a silence that was not empty, but full of everything that remained unsaid. The air was thick with the smell of cut grass and a scent I couldn’t name.

I was already sitting on the bench.

He walked up with his bag slung over one shoulder. His eyes scanned the surroundings and then found mine. Not long enough to call it a choice. Just long enough to shift a boundary that I could no longer push back.

He sat down next to me without saying anything. There was exactly enough space between us to make it seem like coincidence. I felt that emptiness as a physical pressure that slowed and grew denser. His knee moved a fraction, as if he wanted to turn toward me and then didn’t. I stared straight ahead at the field where no one was playing anymore and tried to follow my own breathing, as if it were the last thing I still had control over.

I knew his name. Adam. I had once heard someone else say it in a tone that made him smaller than he was. Since then I had followed him in the hallways from the corner of my eye, the way you follow a fire you know is dangerous to look at directly.

“You were sitting here yesterday too,” he said. “And the day before.”

His voice was lower than I had expected. Not heavy, but carried, as if every word had to come from somewhere deep before he released it. I nodded. My throat was bone dry, even though I wasn’t thirsty.

“It’s quieter here,” I said.

He smiled at the field, not at me. “I thought so too.”

We were silent, but it wasn’t emptiness. It was a waiting that had direction, that was moving toward something without knowing what. I felt my hands resting on my knees; they were too still, too aware of themselves. Every movement I didn’t make seemed to scream.

He told me about a math test he had messed up. His words came in short sentences, sometimes interrupted by a hesitation, as if he first listened to how they sounded. I watched him nervously rub his thumb over a blue ink stain on his index finger. I heard his voice, but what I really registered was how it softened at the end of a sentence, how he let silences fall like carefully placed pawns.

“You get it, right?” he asked.

“Sometimes,” I said.

He laughed softly, a sound that stayed more in his chest than came out. I felt the vibration in my stomach.

Then he leaned forward to kick away a small stone with the toe of his sneaker. The movement brought his shoulder against mine for a moment. Just short enough not to call it a touch, but long enough to know that the space between us had shrunk. And he didn’t pull away.

I stared hard at the chalk lines on the field. My heart was beating so hard against my ribs that I was afraid it was visible, that he could hear it if he stopped breathing.

“It’s strange,” he said suddenly.

I turned my head. “What?”

“That sometimes you sit somewhere and think you’re not there by accident.”

I looked at him then. His eyes were lighter than I had thought, gray-green, or maybe more green-gray, with golden flecks around the pupil. I couldn’t tell exactly because he was too close for me to stay objective. There was an expression in them that wasn’t immediately readable, a look that forced me to keep watching longer than felt safe.

“Like you were supposed to be here,” he continued, his voice even softer.

“Yes,” I said.

A door slammed shut somewhere farther away, the sound slowed by distance. The wind brushed through the dry grass along the stands. I heard his breathing next to mine; not in the same rhythm, not matching, but not entirely separate either. Two metronomes slowly moving toward each other.

His hand shifted on the wooden bench. First a few centimeters, then back, then a centimeter farther than before. I followed the movement against my will. My hand lay open on my knee and I was aware of every pore, of the simmering warmth of my skin. The distance between us was now so small that something could tip with every heartbeat.

I thought: if I do something now, everything changes.

And at the same time: if I do nothing, it changes too.

“Peter,” he said.

My name sounded different in his mouth than in anyone else’s. Fuller. As if he held onto the letters longer.

“Yes?”

He didn’t look at me. “Do you ever think about it? That things can happen without anyone planning them.”

I knew it had stopped being about math a long time ago. I turned my hand very slowly so my palm faced upward, open. An invitation he could ignore if he wanted.

He didn’t want to.

His fingers touched the edge of my hand. At first only the side, so lightly it could have been a mistake, a trick of the wind. I didn’t pull back. I left my hand there as if I expected nothing and allowed everything. Then his fingers closed around mine. Not possessive, but questioning, as if he was checking whether I was real.

I was.

His shoulder rested against mine and stayed there. Through the fabric of his T-shirt I felt the heat of his body; not the dry asphalt warmth, but something that came from within, something alive. My breathing became slower but deeper, as if my lungs were claiming more space than I usually gave them.

I could smell him now. The sharp scent of deodorant from the locker room, mixed with the warm, honest smell of sun on his skin. It pulled me toward him without me moving.

“It’s actually pretty quiet here,” he said.

His voice was barely more than breath.

“Yes,” I said.

I carefully shifted my fingers and let them slide along his. Not to grab him, but to explore. His hand responded immediately: a subtle adjustment, an agreement. A conversation without words, one that didn’t need any. I felt the light pressure of his knuckles against mine, the rough warmth of his palm, and the tension in his grip that betrayed: I’m not letting you go just like that.

He turned his body toward me until our knees touched. The bench felt narrower, or we felt bigger. The world outside us shrank until it was nothing but scenery.

I looked at him. He looked back now, finally, and there was a recognition in his gaze I had never seen anywhere before. It made me completely calm and put everything inside me on edge at the same time.

“Is this okay with you?” he asked.

His voice was pure whisper.

I nodded. My throat wouldn’t allow words; any sound would damage this moment.

I don’t know who moved closer. Maybe both of us. Maybe it was the space itself that closed. Our faces were so close that I could see the micro-movements of his lips, the tension around his mouth, the way his gaze softened right before our lips met.

It wasn’t a kiss that searched. It was a kiss that confirmed what had already been decided before we knew it ourselves. His lips were warm and determined. My hand tightened around his and I felt my whole body turn toward him. Shoulder, knee, and breathing found each other in a rhythm we didn’t need to agree on.

When we pulled apart, it wasn’t because we wanted to. We simply needed air.

We stayed sitting close together, our foreheads almost touching, his breath warm on my skin, our hands still intertwined. He smiled briefly, as if asking permission to be happy. I felt something deep inside me tear open, a shield I had unconsciously kept closed for years.

“So this,” he said, “is what happens.”

“Yes,” I said.

We stayed there until the sky turned purple and the warmth finally left the asphalt. When we stood up there was no hurry. His shoulder brushed mine one last time, a final check that it had all been real.

“See you tomorrow?” he asked.

The question hung between us, heavy with meaning now that everything was different.

“Yes,” I said.

He nodded. No big gestures, no solemn promises. Just that one nod. It was enough.

We walked off in different directions. After a few steps I looked back. He did too. For a second we stood still at a distance, but the invisible thread between us stayed taut.

I didn’t know what this would become. Whether it would last, or evaporate like so many things do.

But I knew it had settled inside me. In my flesh, deeper than a memory.

Like warmth that has nowhere to go.

NOTE: Did you make it this far? Reblog me and i like you!

[pauldespijker]

A story about the presence of someone who is actually no longer here.

Mountain Echo

I call. You drift. Each day a fraction deeper into the mist.

I read your eyes the spark has moved to an address I do not know. Where does your heart sleep now?

I do not say it aloud, but it lives in the white space: I love you with a weight that breaks words.

You inhabit a room in my soul. The door stands ajar. Always.

And yet I hear the sigh of a draft announcing a gentle close.

Stay. Become a rhythm in my breath, a shadow that does not leave my light.

There was a moment when you chose me. It stands still. It does not age.

I have been blessed. I know the colour of happiness.

But fear grows slowly, like moss on a cold wall.

I reach for you as if distance were a substance I could push away with my hands.

The distance between us is not a road we can walk, but a landscape in which I lose my way while sitting beside you.

Come closer. Become solid again.

Without you I slip free from my own anchor.

The night already knows: I clutch a pillow as if it were an answer, as if it still breathed your name.

My hands search the air that refuses to take shape.

I gather the crumbs of your gaze. I save them for the winter already lodged in my bones.

If this is the edge of what we were, let me feel your nearness one more time, as if time itself has erred.

The silence where your heart now rests is a language I do not speak.

I bow. Not from weakness, but because I do not know how to carry the sky without you.

Stay. Or do not vanish completely. Leave a trace of light behind for without you I am not gone, but a sentence halfway.

(Translate from Dutch.)

[pauldespijker]

One Night Full of Love

It was a rainy evening in the city, the kind of evening when the world seems to retreat behind a gray curtain of drops. I had just come from work, the umbrella gripped firmly in my hand. The cold dampness was already creeping under my collar when I turned the corner into my street. There, in the shadow of my doorway, he stood.

He was soaked through. His clothes clung to his body like a second skin and his hair hung in blond strands across his forehead. His shoulders shook slightly from the cold. No coat, no umbrella, only a lonely boy sheltering from something bigger than the rain. I stopped beside him. Water streamed from my umbrella onto the pavement tiles, a rhythmic patter in the otherwise quiet street. He looked up and his eyes were wide, almost glassy from the cold. In a voice that barely rose above the drumming, he asked, "Do you maybe have something to drink for me? I have been put out on the street and I do not know where to go."

His words touched me somewhere deep inside, a gentle nudge against a longing I had long buried under layers of routine. I smiled and he accepted that smile as if it were a warm blanket. He smiled back, vulnerable and almost shy. A connection formed, immediate and inexplicable, a spark that tightened my chest.

"Come inside," I said softly. "I still have an old jacket you can have."

The warmth of shelter

Inside, the scent of my home wrapped around us at once. It was a familiar blend of freshly ground coffee, old wood, and the faint sweet aroma of a candle I had lit earlier. The rain tapped against the windows, a muted drumming that pushed the outside world far away and made the room feel smaller and more intimate. I did not ask his name. Instead I led him to the bathroom, laid a clean towel on the edge of the sink, and gently closed the door behind me.

While steam curled out from under the door and the water could be heard running over his skin, I heard him sigh. It was a deep, tired sigh that spoke of too many nights alone. I leaned for a moment against the wall in the hallway and closed my eyes. Is this love at first sight, I wondered, or are these simply two lost souls who happened to find each other in the storm?

In the kitchen I began to chop. The sharp scent of garlic and fresh herbs filled the air and mingled with the smell of rain that still clung to his discarded clothes. A little later he appeared in the doorway, wrapped in my bathrobe. The sleeves were too long and the shoulders too wide, but his skin was warm and his hair tousled from the towel. He looked around the kitchen as if stepping into an unfamiliar country, and when his eyes found mine he hesitated for a fraction of a second before coming closer.

We cooked together in a natural rhythm. Our elbows brushed now and then and every touch felt like a spark slowly catching. The loneliness still hung around him like an invisible cloak. I saw it in the way he stared at the drops sliding down the glass, as if he were still lost out there. And yet I also saw longing, a quiet hunger in his eyes whenever they sought mine.

The dance of closeness

We ate at the small kitchen table under the soft light of the pendant lamp. The pasta was simple but rich in flavor, the tomato sauce spicy and comforting. Every bite felt like a small victory over the cold outside. We spoke little, but the silence was not empty. It was more a quiet that slowly filled with trust.

While doing the dishes our fingers slid along each other in the hot, soapy water. The touch lasted longer than necessary. The scent of soap mingled with his own scent, something fresh and masculine, with a hint of rain. I felt the hollow emptiness in my chest slowly being filled by something deep, something that cried out for closeness.

Later, over our coffee, we talked about everything and nothing. About jobs that weighed too heavily and dreams we still did not dare speak aloud. We laughed at small things, soft and husky, and the room filled with that sound. He was so close that I could feel the warmth of his body. His hands rested loosely around his cup, his fingers slender and calm, and I noticed I was looking at them too long. When the cups were empty a silence fell that was not awkward but charged.

"Please do not take this the wrong way," he said suddenly, his voice low and raw. "I just stay one night." He leaned a little closer and his knee touched mine under the table. "All I want is to make love to you. Say you want that. That you want me too."

The merging

His honesty was disarming. We stood up and the floor creaked softly under our feet as we walked to the bedroom. The light from the streetlamp fell through the window and cast bluish shadows across the sheets. In bed the sheets felt cool at first, but his body was glowing warm. I pulled him against me and felt his heartbeat quicken in the same rhythm as mine.

Our kisses were no longer careful. They became hungry and deep, as if we wanted to erase years of loneliness in a single night. My fingers explored the lines of his back, the tension in his shoulder muscles that melted under my touch. He groaned softly, a raw sound that went through me to the bone. I tasted the salt on his lips and smelled the musky warmth of his skin.

We caressed each other with an intensity that almost hurt. His weight was a welcome pressure, his hands at once rough and tender. Every movement was an answer to a longing I had denied all that time. Sweat beaded on our bodies and the sheets became crumpled and warm while the room filled with the sound of our breathing. Two strangers who finally claimed each other and filled the emptiness with fire.

The bitter awakening

All night we were intimate as old acquaintances. When the first light of dawn crept into the room and the rain finally eased, he fell into a deep sleep with his arm loosely around my waist. I stayed lying there and looked at him. His face was soft in the first gray light, his lips slightly parted. My chest tightened with a pain sweeter than I had expected.

I must have dozed off at some point, because when I opened my eyes the room was already bright and I lay alone in my large bed. The place beside me was still warm. On the nightstand lay a note, the words scribbled in haste: Do not try to find me, please do not dare. Just go on living with the memory. You will always be in my thoughts. All I wanted was to make love to you. One night full of love was all we knew.

A tear slid down my cheek and fell onto the pillow. My heart felt torn between the fulfillment that still glowed in my muscles and the sharp loneliness that was already lurking again in the corners of the room. I had given him one night and he me, but apparently he did not dare ask for more. Or maybe I was the one who could not see beyond that one night, that one storm.

The encounter

More than a year passed before it happened. We were walking in the same direction through a busy shopping street on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon. The sun shone brightly, but the memory of that rainy night hung like a shadow between us when our eyes met. The surprise on his face was painfully clear. His eyes widened, just for a moment, before he regained control.

I stopped. He did too. The bustle of the city seemed to blur around us into a haze of faces and sound.

He looked different from how I had kept him in my memory. Calmer. More settled in himself. Beside him walked a man who held his hand with the ease of someone who had been doing so for a long time. I saw it in one glance and felt something in my chest close gently, like a door that did not slam but simply leaned shut.

"How are you," he said. Not a question, more a statement. His voice was exactly as I remembered it, low and a little raw at the edges.

"Good," I said. "It is going well."

It was not a lie. I had also picked up my life again, had found myself back in the daily things, in someone else who loved me in a way that was steady and quiet. But steady and quiet is not the same as that night. We both knew that.

The man beside him looked friendly and unsuspecting. He could not know what hung between us, invisible and heavy as wet wool. I nodded to him, a polite gesture, and he nodded back.

We stood there for a few seconds longer. Long enough to feel what could not be said. His eyes sought mine once, quick and sharp, and in that look everything was contained: the recognition, the longing, and the knowledge that this was it. Not a beginning. Not a resumption. Only this. A sidewalk in the sun, two lives that briefly came alongside each other and then moved apart again.

"Nice to see you," he said at last.

"You too," I said.

Then we walked on, each our own way. I did not look back. I knew he did not either. That was perhaps the only thing we could still give each other, without words.

At home that evening I sat for a long time at the kitchen table. The lamp cast the same soft light as that night more than a year ago. I thought of his hair hanging in strands across his forehead, of the way he had sighed under the shower, of the warmth of his body that had found mine in the dark. The memory had not faded. It had only grown narrower, more precise, like a scar that no longer hurts but will always be there.

One night full of love was all we had had. And however bitter it tasted, it had been enough to know what was possible. Sometimes that is the hardest thing to carry, not the absence of someone, but the lasting knowledge that he exists, somewhere, in a life that is not yours.

(Translate from Dutch.)

[dewoestijnvos]

[pauldespijker]

Just Together

We never stood on a pedestal. We simply stood side by side, on the sidewalk, in the midst of the everyday, and yet it felt as if the world had gently folded itself around us. As if someone had adjusted the light.

Since you have been here, everything is warmer. Not exaggerated, not flashy, but exactly enough to feel the difference between existing and living.

Your presence is no storm, but a breath that lingers, a gentle movement of air that my skin recognizes even before I see you.

I do not know when it began. Perhaps in a glance that lingered just a little too long, or in the way your voice let my name settle as if it belonged there. Perhaps it was even earlier, in a moment so ordinary that I did not even recognize it as a beginning.

Since then I carry you with me in small, invisible gestures. In how I drink my coffee, more slowly, more attentively, as if every moment might hold something of you. In how I sometimes pause at a color in the sky, a scent that drifts past, and think: you would see this too.

The mornings with you have their own color. The light falls differently inside, breaking in silence across the table, and there you sit, with hair that still holds onto sleep, with eyes that slowly open the day.

The scent of coffee blends with you, a warmth that is not only in my hands but somewhere deeper, where words are no longer needed.

And I look. Not fleetingly, not absentmindedly, but as if looking itself is a way of holding.

You read, your fingers glide along the edge of a page, and even that simple gesture has something that stills me. As if beauty hides in everything you do without you knowing it.

We talk, but just as often we do not. And in those silences the most happens. There our hands find each other without arrangement, as if they already knew each other before we did.

Your skin against mine is not a sensation, but a recognition. As if my body says: you belong here.

We walk through the city and everything seems to move with us. The wind, the sounds, the rhythm of our steps, as if the world adjusts to the measure of us together.

I see how people look, sometimes briefly, sometimes longer, but I understand it. What we have is not loud, not grandly announced, but it radiates. Like warmth radiates from something that truly burns.

On the way we sometimes buy something small, bread, or flowers you do not need, and yet we choose them carefully, as if even that choice is ours, as if even that choice says something about how we inhabit the world.

In the evenings, when the day softens, we read. Taking turns, your voice carrying words as if they exist for the first time, my hand finding yours between two sentences.

The story in the book often drifts away, but this remains: you beside me, the peace of shared time, the certainty without proof.

Sometimes I wonder how this is possible. Not out of doubt, but out of wonder. How someone can fit so precisely into the space I could never name, how your presence fills something I did not know was empty.

Love, people say. But that word is too small, too often used, spoken too casually. What I experience with you is not a concept, but a state. A gentle, ongoing affirmation that I am not alone in the deepest part of my being.

It is also this: that I can be tired beside you, without needing to explain why. That silence is not emptiness but a form of trust, so natural that I forget what it was like without knowing that trust.

When night falls and the world withdraws, we lie there, breath beside breath, heartbeat beside heartbeat, and somewhere between those rhythms something arises that is not visible but carries everything.

I listen to your breath, feel how it mingles with mine, and in that simple merging lies a completeness that asks for nothing more.

If this is rare, then that is only reason to speak more softly, to look more attentively, and to preserve more carefully what unfolds here between us.

Not because it might disappear, but because it is too precious to carry carelessly.

So I stay. I look. I touch you as if every time is the first.

And in everything you are, I find not an answer, but a home.

(Translate from Dutch.)

[pauldespijker]

[dewoestijnvos]

[pauldespijker]

! Beautiful couple !

[pauldespijker]

Come with me

I reach out my hand. Come with me.

Evening falls softly around us, a liquid velvet blue that washes away the hard edges of the day and leaves only the essence of your face. We have known each other for so long that our silences have learned to breathe; they no longer need words to be understood. You have always been that warm undercurrent in my life, a gentle ripple that never quite let me go, even when the tides pulled us apart for a while. In the years we circled each other, I felt your presence in the smallest details: a laugh that lingered a fraction too long in the air, a gaze that searched the depths of my soul and rested there for a moment. A casual touch at goodbye that was just a little too intimate, a little too slow to be purely friendly.

I pretended for a long time that I did not see it, afraid to disturb the fragile balance between us. But the truth can no longer be ignored.

Now we stand here, at this tipping point where time seems to slow to a single, trembling moment. My fingers touch yours, first lightly like a question, then with complete surrender like an answer. The warmth of your skin moves through me like an electric promise, a current that strikes straight to my heart. I know, with a certainty that reaches into my bones, that I will be good to you. I will give you space to fly without ever losing sight of you; I will hold you without smothering you. And you... you are the only one who can turn on the light in the dusty corners of my existence. We belong together. That is no longer a choice; it is an inevitability.

"Take my hand," I whisper, and my voice sounds rougher, deeper than I expected.

You hesitate for a fraction of a second. I see the doubt as a slight crease between your eyebrows and hear how your breath catches. It is the sacred moment of the leap, the second before gravity takes over. The air between us vibrates with everything that remained unsaid. I hold my breath, my entire being focused on your response. Then your fingers slide between mine, firm and irrevocable, as if they were always meant to rest there. The anchoring is complete.

We will make your dream come true together. Not in some distant future, not when the stars happen to align, but now. This is our moment. There is no other path that gives this feeling of coming home. No safer harbor than the hollow between my shoulder and my neck. No other pair of hands that fits so seamlessly into mine, as if they were once carved from the same marble.

I pull you closer until the last remnants of distance between us disappear. Our bodies find each other with the instinctive precision of magnets. Your chest against mine, your heartbeat an urgent rhythm that blends with my own feverish pace. I smell the familiar scent of your skin: warm, spicy, with an undertone of the evening air and a deep, smoldering desire. I feel the last traces of tension in your shoulders melt under the pressure of my hands, as if you finally dare to believe that this is real. My lips find the soft hollow of your neck, where your pulse quickens. I kiss you there, slowly and tasting, while I feel the light salt of your skin on my tongue. You draw in a sharp breath, a brief sound of pure surrender that I want to etch into my memory.

"Hold me tight," I whisper against your ear, my breath a warm breeze over your skin that makes you shiver.

Your arms close around me, strong and hungry, as if you are afraid I will dissolve like a mirage if you loosen your grip. Our mouths meet in a kiss that leaves no room for hesitation. It is a release of years of pent-up tenderness and desire, of all those missed moments and near-touches that now demand their due at once. Our tongues seek each other in a dance of recognition, teeth gently nipping lips, and my hands glide impatiently over your back while fabric and clothes become nothing more than annoying barriers. I feel your fingers wander over my lower back, lower now, possessive and sure. A shiver runs like wildfire down my spine. Here, in the shelter of this evening, the world shrinks until there is only the two of us.

I come when you call me. I catch you before you hit the ground.

We let ourselves be carried by gravity to the bed, where the sheets are cool but our skin burns. Clothes slip away, an unnecessary skin of our old life. At last there is only skin on skin, the ultimate, naked honesty. I caress you with a devotion that borders on worship, as if I want to learn every line, every scar, and every curve of your body anew. I take my time. I want to miss nothing; every millimeter of your skin is a map I am finally allowed to explore. You kiss my chest, my stomach, lower and lower, until I moan your name and my fingers bury deep in your hair. The rhythm we find is ancient and yet completely new: a symphony of movement in which we lose ourselves to truly find each other at last. In the soft half-light we are finally where we belong.

Afterward we lie entangled, the boundary between where I end and you begin completely blurred. Your head rests on my chest and my fingers play lazily with your hair, while the adrenaline slowly gives way to a deep, sated peace. Outside, a light night breeze makes the curtains dance in the moonlight, a gentle witness to our union. I listen to your breathing, which slowly becomes steadier; the sound of someone who has come home. There is a sweet, almost electric promise in the room, as if the universe itself is holding its breath and giving us an approving nod. I think of all those years when this feeling hovered just out of reach, and I smile against the crown of your head.

Nothing can stand in our way anymore.

Of course there will be bends in the road, I know that. There will be dark stretches where the shadows of the past try to creep back in and where doubt stretches out its cold fingers toward us. But I will be there. I will be so close that you can feel my breath on your cheek when it grows dark. I will remind you of this night, of this warmth, of the unmistakable magic we have unleashed together. You only need to keep believing. As long as our hope survives, and it will, fate will always lead us back to this moment.

I will bring all your dreams to life, layer by layer, stone by stone. Only for you.

From where I stand, you are safe. With me. In us.

I kiss your forehead, a soft, lingering seal on everything we have just shared. You smile against my skin, a gesture of pure peace from someone who has finally found what he was looking for. I pull you a little closer and feel how you completely surrender to that movement, without resistance, without reservation.

Come with me, my love. We will go on together, into the night and toward every new morning.

[pauldespijker]

[pauldespijker]

[pauldespijker]

This story is shaped as a brief inner monologue, in which physical reality and inner experience are constantly interwoven. It tells of a man I have known for years, exclusively through the internet. We share thoughts about life and speak about what occupies our minds. Despite the war in Ukraine, our contact has never been broken. In fact, under those circumstances, our friendship has endured and gained meaning. As a tribute to that, I have put his story to paper. This is Ivan’s story.

The Last Watcher of the Frost

My name is Ivan, twenty-nine years old, and sometimes it feels as though I am the last one turning off the lights in a city deep in Russia, where the cold never truly leaves. There was no dramatic collapse, no great explosion, only a quiet, slow decay that meets your eyes every morning, as the frost scratches at the windows and the emptiness in my chest grows heavier.

My mother died when I was still a child. She vanished from my life before my memory could truly hold her touch. I have no recollection of the gentle pressure of her arms or the safety of her lap; she is a faint scent of flowers and soap dissolved into the winter air. My father and my only brother never returned from the war in Ukraine. No letter, no body, only an official notice that lodged in my throat like ice. There is no one else. I am the sole bearer of a name no one speaks anymore.

The Silence of the Skin

On top of all that, I carry a secret that in this town is seen as betrayal: I am attracted to men. In a place where walls have ears and silence itself is always judging, my desire has become an underground current. It is a loneliness that goes beyond the absence of company; it is a deep, physical starvation. I am twenty-nine years old, and my skin is still uncharted territory, a map on which no one has ever set foot.

I do not know the living warmth of another body. My father and brother were men of wood and steel, who showed their love through silence and hard work, never through an embrace. Sometimes, lying in bed, I place my own hand against my neck, just to feel the warmth of my skin transfer, but it is a meager comfort that only makes the cold more apparent.

Dawn as an Excuse

In the mornings, I wipe the ice flowers from the window, and the light falls in like a pale, cold excuse. The street lies motionless beneath a thick layer of snow. Three houses down have stood empty for more than two years; the paint on the window frames peels away in long, pale curls that the wind carries off like dead skin.

When I step outside, the snow crunches beneath my boots. My neighbor is shoveling his stoop, a futile ritual against a sky that never stops giving. “Dobroe utro, Ivan,” he says, his voice rough from cheap tobacco. We exchange the names of those who succumbed during the night, to age or to drink. I nod, feel the frost creep through my socks, and swallow my tears.

There are no men my age left here. The boys I once secretly watched, their broad shoulders beneath thin shirts during those brief, sultry summers, are long gone. I have never felt a hand seeking mine in the morning, no rough stubble against my cheek, no voice that could melt the loneliness. That realization presses in on me every morning like a draft through a crack in the door.

A Dream in Technicolor

During the day, I work at the hardware store, selling nails to people desperately trying to shield their homes from the endless freezing cold. I earn just enough to avoid starving. Saving for a future elsewhere feels like a joke; every ruble disappears into the stove.

On my break, I scroll through my phone. There I see the world I know only from dreams: Amsterdam. I see photos of men walking hand in hand along the canals in the rain. Their lives feel like a film in technicolor, while mine is black-and-white and grainy, as if someone has turned down the sharpness. My sexual struggle is a constant battle: desire flaring up when I see a strong arm at the store, followed by the deep shame I feel alone in bed at night. When I touch myself, it is often with a bitter anger, a hurried attempt to break the tension that leaves me feeling only emptier.

I dream of a steady partner in that distant, green country. I imagine us cycling through the summer rain together, and how he would hold me in a warm bed until the inner frost finally leaves my bones. A place where my skin is finally allowed to come home.

The Keeper of the Museum

The evenings are the hardest. In the only bar still open, “The Golden Bear,” it smells of stale beer and missed chances. We drink in silence while the snow lashes against the windows. What am I still doing here? Do I stay out of loyalty to my parents, who endured the cold here all their lives, or am I simply too afraid to leave without a penny to my name?

Sometimes I feel like a museum guard in a building no one visits anymore. I watch over the memory of my first kiss behind the cinema, with a boy who long ago fled abroad, and the distant echo of my mother’s laughter in the kitchen. Yet the silence also holds something intimate. When the streetlights flicker on and the snow turns orange, I see the familiar silhouettes of the birch trees. Their branches creak softly, like the only voice that still knows me.

The danger is not loneliness itself. The danger is resignation, the moment when you stop longing for warmth because you have forgotten what it feels like. But somewhere, deep inside, a small flame still flickers. Perhaps it is time not to turn off the light, but to let it serve as a beacon. For myself. For the man I might be somewhere else. In The Netherlands, my dreamland, where winter is short and freedom is vast. Where cows graze in green fields and tulips grow. The land of Van Gogh and Rembrandt. That is where I want to be. The place where I no longer have to be a shadow, but a man of flesh and blood, held by someone who truly loves me.

(Written in Dutch and translated into English.)

[pauldespijker]

Drops

I am sitting on the couch when he comes out of the bathroom.

The light of the late afternoon falls softly over his wet skin, golden and slow, as if the day itself hesitates for a moment before giving way. Drops still slide over his shoulders, his chest, his stomach, and disappear into the blond hair below his navel. He walks slowly, unselfconsciously, as though nakedness is the most natural state of his body. And from now on, it will be the most natural state of our days as well. Days filled with lust, with hunger, with that soft, persistent longing that never fully fades.

He hums an old song, low and warm, as he moves through the room. I vaguely recognize the melody, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is the sound itself: that voice, that tone, that carefree ease. My heart beats harder. I am infinitely awake. Every cell in my body seems to lean toward him, as if he generates a field that pulls me in and arranges me. He is still warm from the shower, his skin lightly pink, his muscles smooth beneath that glow. Proud yet soft. Masculine and vulnerable at the same time.

God, he is beautiful.

I can’t find words big enough. Everything I have ever looked for in a body is standing here in front of me: the broad line of his shoulders, the deep groove of his back, the powerful thighs, the heavy, calm dong that sways gently with every step. His mouth, full and well-shaped, made for kissing, biting, whispering, and licking. I look and cannot stop looking. There is something almost unbearable about so much beauty that has no idea of itself.

He is naked. And he is mine.

The room still seems to be breathing from what we did earlier. The sheets lie crumpled on the floor. The air is thick and heavy with scent: sweat, sex, soap, and something animal that only the two of us create together, a smell I could never describe to someone who has never breathed it. My own body reacts instantly. A warm wave moves through my lower belly, my nipples tighten, and between my legs I grow wet and heavy with pure desire.

He looks up, catches my gaze, and smiles slowly.

That smile. That one smile is enough to melt me, to make everything outside this room fade away. Without saying a word, he comes closer. I part my legs just a little, an unconscious invitation, and I see his gaze slide there, dark and attentive.

"Come," I say softly. My voice is already hoarse.

He lowers himself beside me, too close for any pretense of distance. The heat of his skin radiates through my clothes as if fabric is no obstacle, only a formality. His hand slides over my thigh, moving upward, possessive but tender. With his other hand he lifts my chin. His eyes are dark, full of lust and something deeper, something that goes far beyond mere desire, something I have suspected for a while but have not yet wanted to name out loud.

His mouth finds mine. At first soft, tasting, as if he wants to remember how I taste. Then deeper. His tongue slips inside and I moan softly against his lips. He tastes of toothpaste and of himself. My hands move over his still-damp back, feeling the muscles shift under my fingers, the warmth that radiates from him like stone that has lain in the sun all day. I pull him closer. I want to feel his weight on me, his hardness against my soft skin.

"Touch me," I whisper between two kisses. "Make love to me. Love my body the way only you can."

He groans softly, deep from his chest, a sound that is more answer than words could ever be. His hand slips under my shirt, finds my breast, squeezes gently, strokes my hard nipple with his thumb until I gasp and my head falls back. His mouth moves down to my neck, sucking, licking, biting softly. Every touch sends sparks through my body, straight to the pulsing need between my legs. I hear myself breathing and barely recognize the sound as my own.

His arousal is already growing against my hip, warm and heavy. I feel him throb, ready for me, and a fresh wave of desire washes through me, deeper than the last.

This is it. This is what I have always wanted.

Not just a body. Not just the heat and the hunger, although those are there too, full and without shame. I want all of him. This man, naked and open, who desires me with his entire being. Who kisses me as if he will never get enough. Who touches me as if my skin is the most sacred thing he has ever felt.

And as his fingers slide further down, under the waistband of my pants, and I arch my back against his hand, I know it for certain.

This is love. This is lust. This is us, inseparable and complete.

Outside, evening is beginning to fall. The light in the room shifts, growing warmer, pinker, drawing itself around the two of us as if the day too does not want to let go. I hear him say my name, soft and low, and there is something in the way he does it that tears me open from the inside in the most beautiful way I know.

I surrender.

The days to come will smell of his skin and taste of his mouth. They will sound like the soft, sensual noise of two bodies that no longer want to come apart, and like the quiet, complete silence afterward, when we lie against each other and the world outside simply continues, unaware of what has begun here, in this room, between us.

[pauldespijker]

The Man with His Divine Beauty

I wander aimlessly through the desolate city, a shadow among shadows, until the heavy doors of the cathedral loom before me like a silent verdict. I decide to go inside. Without purpose. Without reason. Or at least, that is what I tell myself as I press down the copper handle.

It is a transition that slowly folds around you, as if you are entering another world without anyone saying it out loud. When the door opens, the cold meets you: a quiet, ancient cold that has crept deep into the stones and stayed there as an invisible inhabitant. It is not a sharp, biting chill, but a muted and enduring freshness that touches the skin like a distant memory. As if the space forces you to slow your heartbeat and adjust to the slow rhythm of eternity.

Beneath that cold hangs the scent of time. Incense, soft and spicy, still lingers in the vaults even though hours have passed since the last mass. It blends with the warm, lightly sweet wax smell of candles that have slowly burned down to small pools of hardened sorrow. You also catch the moisture: old stone that has absorbed rain and centuries, and something dusty, almost velvety, rising from the wooden pews and the worn kneelers where generations have searched for something to hold on to.

The light plays its own refined role here. It does not simply enter but slides in thin beams through the high windows, fractures against the stained glass, and casts patches of blood red, deep blue, and liquid gold across the floor. In those rays the dust particles dance, slow and weightless, as if even the air here breathes more calmly than it does on the hurried streets outside. Sound undergoes a transformation. Footsteps fall heavier, carried by the immense height. A cough, the rustle of a coat, the soft drip of a candle: everything acquires meaning, because silence here is not an absence but a tangible presence. A listening silence that waits for a confession I do not yet dare to speak.

Somewhere between those scents and that filtered light a feeling emerges that cannot be caught in words. Something intimate, almost fragile. As if the space is not only vast but also deep, saturated with the echoes of people who have sat here, whispered, and hoped. You are never entirely alone. Even in the deepest emptiness the church is filled with everything that remained unspoken between a person and their god.

The church organ plays with restraint, its notes dissolving in the cold air like smoke. I withdraw into the shadow of the massive columns, my hands pushed deep into the pockets of my worn black coat. The music is too soft to offer any hold and too present to ignore. I let my gaze drift across the empty pews, the pinched flames of the candles at the side altars, the stone that betrays nothing. I came here without purpose, and the space accepts that, without judgment, without welcome.

And then I see him.

The man with his divine beauty.

Saint Sebastian.

He stands there in the bright white light before the altar, as if the rays themselves are the arrows piercing him. Every note he releases, every piercing cry that shatters against the vaults, feels like a public execution I cannot look away from. He is beautiful in his ruin, a silver mirror in which I see everything I have tried so carefully to hide beneath layers of indifference.

In the dark hollows of his eyes I see my own cowardice. As he stands there, fully exposed to the invisible scorn of the crowd, I realize I am the one who drew the bow. Not out of hatred, but out of an even greater sin: icy detachment. I left him standing there on that altar of glitter and drama so I could feel safe in the anonymity of the dark.

I make a desperate attempt at prayer. It is a prayer without words; the holy texts I forgot long ago, and any new ones refuse to form in the dryness of my throat. The sentences I once knew are weathered like inscriptions on an old tombstone, clear enough to show that something was once written there, yet too faded to reveal what it meant. His martyrdom is a drama I have directed through my own neglect. Every time he spreads his arms I see my own sins reflected in the flickering sequins on his chest: the lies I told to save my skin, the promises I broke when the world grew too cold to keep them.

He carries the shame I do not dare to feel. He is pure because he gives everything, down to the last drop of his being; I am stained because I hold everything back, my emotions safely locked behind a wall of cynicism. It is an exchange I never proposed aloud, yet one to which he has submitted anyway, as if his devotion were a silent contract I signed with my absence.

The church organ now swells to full force, a wall of sound that physically presses me against the cold stones. The vibrations echo in my bones, as if the cathedral itself has begun to cry out against the injustice of this sacrifice. I want to shout that he must stop, that he does not need to destroy himself for my redemption, that I am not worth the price. But the words stick in my throat, dry as ash on the tongue, too late and too cowardly to matter anymore. My mouth moves, yet the space refuses to carry my voice.

For as long as he bleeds in the merciless light, I do not have to bleed in the shelter of the shadow.

I am the spectator of my own moral collapse, and Sebastian is the only one paying the bill. The cathedral around me remains unmoved; its stones have seen too much over the centuries to pass judgment on one lost soul who refuses to step into the light. Only the angle of the light shifts, slow and relentless, as if even the sun is gradually turning its face away from me.

The organ fades in a final, swelling chord that lingers too long and then dissolves like a plume of smoke vanishing into the darkness. The silence that follows is not the same as the silence I entered with. That first silence was empty and willing; this one has weight, has sharp edges, and presses flat hands against my shoulders until I almost have to kneel.

When the last rays of light die away and the darkness finally swallows him like a dark cloak, I remain behind in a deafening emptiness. Not redeemed. Not forgiven. Only finally truly seen by myself, in the shards of the mirror he was, and that I let shatter out of pure fear. The cathedral is now a grave, and I am the only one still breathing.

[pauldespijker]

Short story about Max.

There goes Maxmillian

How I would have loved to be a beautiful boy. The kind people pause for, who can never pass unnoticed because the world follows him with its eyes as if by instinct. Someone who fills a space without saying a word, while soft whispers rise: there he goes. There goes Maxmillian. A boy one might have wished to be, a promise on the verge of being fulfilled.

I imagined how the light would fall on me. How glances would gather like sunrays on my shoulders, my face, the cadence of my stride. Not to possess me, but to share for a moment in something that seemed almost self-evident. Something you could not quite name, yet recognized at once, like the scent of first rain on a warm afternoon of sun-heated stone.

How I would have loved to be that well-formed boy, but without arrogance and without the burden of vanity. Someone who wore his body like a perfectly fitted coat, with a natural pride that did not need to be spoken. Someone who was enough, simply by being there. A body that could entice without asking, that could be gentle and tender, and at the same time stand proud and unyielding when desire arose. When I longed for you and did not even need to speak your name aloud for the air to tremble. That silence alone, that eloquent silence between us, would have been enough to explain everything.

In that dream, the world understood. Everything finally fell into place, like a sentence that had long been searching for its final, redeeming word. People would smile, glance at one another, and without shame say: look, there walk two princes. They would bring fruit, incense, and precious myrrh, not out of duty, but out of pure wonder. Because it is so rare for love to reveal itself so freely. So unabashedly real and radiant.

How I would have loved to be that vision, dressed in light cotton trousers brushing softly along my legs in the summer wind. My skin warm from the sun, my body loose and free, as if I came from nowhere and had nowhere to go. As if the day itself had been made for this one, unhurried existence. For this single breath. This single, almost imperceptible now.

In my mind I saw how you looked at me. How your gaze lingered and how desire slowly took shape in the space between us. Not hurried, not greedy, but like water that patiently finds its way along worn, smooth stone. My movements would be enough: a slight turn of my head, a careless step in the sand, and you would be drawn toward me as if it could never have been otherwise. As if no other outcome were imaginable than the two of us, here and now.

I wanted to be that wondrously beautiful boy in whom everything seemed to align. For whom you would pick flowers along the edge of an overgrown field: elderflower, cornflowers, sweet peas, lilacs, and those heavy peonies that could hardly carry their own scent. I would accept them with a smile that asked nothing and understood everything. My body would move with ease, sitting, standing, bending, as if every posture were a quiet assurance that I was truly there, and that I would remain.

And you, you would come closer. So close that you could feel my breath on your skin. You would hide your face in the hollow of my neck, because there was a place there where you had always wanted to rest. You would finally come home to a place you had never visited before, yet recognized at once by the heartbeat beneath my skin.

For a long time I believed all of this lay far beyond my reach, on the other side of a boundary I did not know but could feel. A boundary I encountered each morning when I looked in the mirror and saw who I was instead of who I wanted to be. And yet the longing remained, quiet and stubborn, like a river that continues to flow even in the driest summer, somewhere deep underground, unseen but alive.

But then. Then comes the day when longing stops searching for another and begins to rest within itself.

There, in that high meadow where the grass brushes against our legs, the air smells of hay, warm and sweet. The sun sinks slowly lower, turning everything it touches to gold. Somewhere in the distance a bird calls, a brief sound that only deepens the silence that follows. Here I show you my love, not with grand gestures, but with touches that linger and a gaze that no longer needs to hide. I lie beside you, close enough to drink in your warmth, far enough to see you in your full beauty.

Sometimes people linger in the distance. They do not judge, they simply look at something rare. Something that moves them without their knowing why, like music they have long known but cannot quite place. And for a moment, as if it were happening to them, they sigh softly: ah, how beautiful love is.

Evening comes as evenings always do, gentle and irreversible. We stand within it, in that golden, fluid light. And as I take your hand and feel the wind move through my hair, I realize that longing has stopped searching. It has found. It has found me.

I look at my hands. I feel the strength in my legs, the calm in my breathing, the warmth of your fingers between mine. The light falls on my shoulders as I once dreamed, but now it feels different, more real, softer. Not as a reward I have earned, but as something that was always mine and only waited for me to dare to receive it.

I no longer have to chase the dream, because I have become the boy I once dreamed of. I am Maxmillian. I am here, I am beautiful, and I am finally exactly who I am meant to be. Not as a memory of what might have been, but as the beautiful, tangible reality of now. Of this moment. Of this breath, this skin, this life, this light.