1. Moon gazing
I saw him the way you see the moon when you’re not looking for it.
Not the dramatic kind—the full, cinematic one that makes people stop walking and tilt their faces up like they’re praying.
The ordinary kind. The one you only notice because the street is darker than it should be, and suddenly the light on your skin feels borrowed.
He was far.
Not far in distance—far in permission.
He looked at me once, and it felt like my ribs forgot their job.
I’m telling you this like it’s romantic.
It wasn’t a glance. It wasn’t a polite sweep of the room.
It was a gaze with weight.
The kind that makes you check your posture not because you want to be pretty, but because your body has abruptly decided it is being evaluated by gravity itself.
If I said he looked at me like hunger, you’d think I’m flattering myself.
I’m not.
Hunger is obvious. Hunger is messy. Hunger asks for something.
This was worse.
This was quiet focus.
This was a man who had learned how to control his face and forgot, just for one moment, that he was supposed to.
I went home afterward and stared at my ceiling like it was a confession booth.
That’s what daydreams do—they turn drywall into a witness.
I invented him because the alternative was admitting I wanted him.
So I called him Moon.
Because I’ve always been able to love things I can’t reach.
And because the moon doesn’t ask you to be brave.
It only asks you to look.







