#ekinae

[yeueun]

The place you are right now suits you; it holds you with a grace I could never quite replicate. I watch from the periphery as the light catches the laughs you gift to others—those effortless, mesmerizing things that fall from your lips like sudden rain. Your smile still shapes pieces of artwork in the air, a gallery of expressions that no longer belong to me.

You have been good since you left. There is a newfound softness you carry, a quiet benediction that you scatter among those new friends of yours, blessing them with a version of yourself that is light and unburdened. You move through your days with a delicate devotion to the present, while I have become a sanctuary for the silence you left behind.

Now, I am prone to a specific kind of sadness—a heavy, familiar weather that settles in my bones. I am a ghost dwelling in the places where you aren't, tracing the outlines of shadows and memorizing the shape of the void. While you are out there, breathing in the wide, open world and blooming in soil that doesn't know my name, I am here, anchored to the low tide of your departure.

I am living your life through the glass, a silent witness to a masterpiece I am no longer allowed to touch. I am breathing in the dust of everything we didn't become, watching you exist in a vibrant, sun-drenched reality while I stay behind to guard the hollows.

[yeueun]

Is wonder a place to dwell, or a depth to drown in?

I find myself longing for a different geometry of being. Why must I carry the weight of this pulse when I could have been a butterfly, flickering through the ribcage of a sleeper—a soft, frantic heartbeat trapped inside a human’s dream? Instead, I am the one who bargains with the horizon, begging the sun to stay buried. I wish for a night that refuses to break, a darkness long enough to swallow the memory of what it means to wake.

You can barely call this evening yet, and already I am praying for the shadows to stretch and thicken. I dread the dawn; I dread the inevitable return to this flesh that feels less like a home and more like a collection of splinters. To rise is to break. To step outside is to witness the grotesque buoyancy of the world—groups of people moving with a lightness that feels like a personal insult. Their joy is a mirror I cannot look into without shattering.

It is as if a silent witness sits above, watching these cells fracture, finding a twisted sort of art in the way I come undone. I am not woven for this architecture of bone and breath; I am simply not cut out for the poracelain fragility of being human.

[yeueun]

i am the least capable in the room, or perhaps only the most aware of it. there is a peculiar violence in being present among those who belong, in occupying a space that seems to recognize everyone but you. i often wonder if gratitude is the expected posture—to sit quietly, to accept proximity as a privilege, to be thankful for air that was never meant for my lungs. and yet something in me resists that quiet acceptance, because what is this if not a slow drowning? not the kind that thrashes and begs to be seen, but the quieter descent, where breath shortens politely and the surface drifts farther without protest.

there are faces here that know me just enough to misname me in their thoughts, a familiarity that does not soften but sharpens, turning me into something measurable, something easily diminished. still, i persist in small, exhausting ways—in showing up, in arranging myself into something almost convincing, in rehearsing belonging until it nearly resembles truth. i watch them, those who move as if the world has already agreed with them, carrying an ease that feels inherited rather than earned. and i remain at the margins of it all, learning not what is being taught, but how to exist without disappearing entirely.

[yeueun]

ㅤ⠀

ㅤ⠀ ⠀ ㅤ⠀ 🥨.⠀ ⊹ ⠀#løveprosë ˓⠀ ͟ 🔍

ㅤ⠀ ⠀ ㅤ⠀ ◌ ﹏ ✶‎　╱　mr. 𝑫etective.

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we would be a misfit.

on paper, if someone had lined up our facts and looked at them from a distance, they would have written us off. there was no logical reason our paths should have bent toward each other, let alone become this necessary.

but you love mysteries. you love the desperate, patient pursuit of an answer—the kind that keeps an investigator awake at two in the morning, pacing a quiet room. you are possessed by the small, haunting details that tell a story: the damp weight of a wet coat slung over a chair, a stray strand of hair left on a pillow, the calculated height of someone standing in the dark, or a single, smudged fingerprint on a glass. you move through the world believing that everything leaves a trace, that longing always leaves a footprint in the mud, and that no one is ever entirely lost if someone cares enough to look.

and i think that is why you found me.

not all at once, not with a dramatic collision, but the way a true investigator pieces together a cold case: step by deliberate step. a sentence mentioned in passing, a poem folded carefully between conversations, a fear disguised as a joke, a heavy loneliness i thought i had buried too deep to be tracked. you gathered these clues without telling me. somewhere along the way, you assembled a version of me from the fragments i didn't even realize i was leaving behind.

that is what unsettles me most. not just that you love me, but that you arrived at me so honestly. you looked at the messy evidence of my life and stayed to investigate. in a world this loud and fractured, your attention is the only thing that makes sense. it is the rarest, most sacred form of love.

months later, you return to me carrying details i have already abandoned—the title of a book i mentioned once, a childhood memory i thought had dissolved into the dark, a word spoken on a rainy afternoon that seemed forgettable to everyone except you. you have longed for me even when i was standing right in front of you, searching for me in the spaces between my breaths, following my shadow through the room.

sometimes i think you know me entirely through accumulation. through a quiet, beautiful gathering of small truths, until they begin to resemble a person. and God, how terrifying it is to be understood through the things you never realized you revealed. i spent so much of my life feeling unread, like a case file left out in the weather, that your devotion feels almost impossible—like discovering someone has been carefully drying and preserving pages i thought the rain had already ruined.

you make me feel documented. remembered. real.

if i am being honest, i want to be studied by you like this forever.

i want to remain unsolved.

i want there to always be another layer of me for you to uncover, another shadow for your hands to find, another quiet mystery for us to wander through together. not because i wish to hide from you, but because the investigation itself has become our love language. i want to be the one mystery you never quite close.

every human being wants to be found. and somehow, against all probability, you did.

ㅤ⠀

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[yeueun]

The eyes that look like a reflection of a lantern,

how did they get here?

For a heart that only returns to a dark room after a storm, I shouldn’t recommend having you near. But how can I resist the pull of the shore? You are the prettiest soul I have ever known, the only one I want to open the door for. How beautiful you are, with that shiny smile and pure soul that burns with a passion it doesn't even know it owns. I would drown myself in that light of yours, sinking down until the only thing left to see is the shade your body throws.

My favorite weather is anything as long as the wind blows, but even in the heaviest gale, your light would never go out. Because it was mine to begin with—it is the light I imagined in the dark when I was full of doubt. It is the only thing I see when the world goes quiet and I think of you.

Let me confess: I have spent a lifetime learning how to be a ghost in my own skin, crouching in the damp corners where the salt-heavy rain always settles after the house gives in. I thought the dark was a shelter because it never asked me to show my wounds. Then you stepped through the frame, carrying your chest like a room where the sun never goes down, completely unaware of the currency of your own heat. It is a terrifying, holy thing, the way you burn without making a sound.

If I had any sense of survival left, I would warn you away. I would tell you that a person who is still wet from the wreckage has no right to touch a thing so beautifully dry. But I am a creature made of greed. I look at the gold pooling in your eyes and I want to sink into that brightness until the water in my lungs finally matches the warmth of your shadow.

I used to pray for the windiest hours—the kind of weather that tries to tear the leaves from the branches—because it felt like the only thing violent enough to echo the noise inside my head. But let the gale press its cold mouth against the glass now. It cannot touch you.

How could it? Long before you arrived to touch my skin, I had already dreamed you up out of the scarcity. When the night was too wide to cross, I sat in the dark and drew the shape of a flame that could save me. I drew your name into the air before I even knew how to speak it. You see, this light isn't a stranger. It is an inheritance. It was always ours to hold, because when I think of you, I am finally thinking of a home that doesn't collapse under the weight of the sky.

[yeueun]

Estevan

you look at me as though i am someone worth lingering over, as if the feeling you found in me had been waiting quietly for you all along. the way you choose me makes me feel unmistakable—not something to be replaced or searched for again, but something already known. it feels as though my heart learned your rhythm before i ever knew your name, as if every beat remembers me where i once doubted myself.

you love me in a way i never learned how to expect. it is unfamiliar and achingly gentle, like being held in a world that is often too heavy to carry alone. with you, living feels lighter, almost kind. you make my days easier to endure, my life softer to inhabit. there are moments with you i want time to forget how to take—memories i return to when i miss you, holding them close as proof that i was loved without condition.

every step you take feels deliberate, as if i were the only one you had ever known, the only soul you wished to meet. i find myself wondering how someone so remarkable could love me with such honesty and care. it is as if every path you’ve walked led you here, to me. and in your presence, i understand something simple and infinite: that being seen, truly seen, can feel like coming home.

[yeueun]

sanctifying deceit

you were never as deep as the shallowness you made me seem. i carried that belief like a confession, letting your gaze reduce me until i mistook your limits for my own. what i thought was depth in you was only the authority of someone who spoke with certainty and never with care.

the mouth that lies is said to deserve punishment—according to the faithful, according to every lesson that ever tried to make holiness simple. yet i kissed those lips anyway. i treated every dishonest word you uttered with tenderness, as though affection could sanctify deceit, as though love itself were a form of pardon. i held your lies close, not because i believed them, but because i wanted to believe you.

what i gave you was real; what you took from me was not. you learned how to harvest devotion without ever intending to return it, how to speak tenderness like a language you never planned to live in. i offered you my trust in full, and you accepted it as entitlement—draining me quietly while calling it love. you hid behind the illusion of goodness, convinced that believing yourself kind would absolve you of the harm you caused. and when i was finally empty—when there was nothing left to take—you looked at the wreckage and acted surprised, as if i had broken myself alone.

in my younger days, i thought awareness would save me—that knowing would make devotion impossible. instead, i loved you with my eyes open, and that is the cruelty i cannot forgive myself for. you shattered me because truth demanded effort you refused to give.

deceiver. coward. fraud. words for someone i once loved—truer than anything i could have admitted while staying. the damage was real, and so was the way you made me feel i deserved it. did you ever love me, or was i only a space to fill your emptiness, a name to claim without meaning it? i mistook that for belonging.

i could never tell if your distance was love twisted by fear or hatred dressed as intimacy. you hid me like a flaw, shrank me until i forgot my own shape—until being beside you felt like erasing myself. but i was never that small. i am who i am now: someone who left, and in leaving, outgrew the insecure man who needed me diminished to feel whole.

[yeueun]

Flowers grew in my lungs,

and I breathed only for you.

When your voice drifts across the room, it carries a lethargic calm that I cannot mimic. To your friends, you are a soft cadence; to me, you are a riot. My heart becomes a frantic, hollow thrumming—a chaos that twists in my stomach like wings beating against a cage. I keep these things behind my teeth. I let the thoughts burn my mind until the heat is all that’s left, a silent fever I carry because the truth of these feelings is a weight you were never meant to hold.

You shouldn’t know.

I have memorized the ghost of your preferences, and they are a map that leads everywhere except to me. Every detail you share about what you love—the traits, the looks, the quiet habits—is a slow tightening of the vine around my throat. I am the opposite of your desire. It is a jagged realization, a twist in my gut that worsens with every word you speak, because I am learning the exact shape of the person I will never be for you.

When you leave, my eyes perform a deliberate, desperate search, scanning the edges of the crowd as if looking for a ghost. It is a hollow ache to confirm, over and over, that you are anchored elsewhere, sitting beside the one who fits the world you want.

Sometimes I wonder if I could reach inside and tear them out—if I could prune even a single petal from the garden you’ve planted in my chest. I want to dull the way you shine in the corner of my mind, to forget how unforgettable you are. But the roots have become my veins, and I am still so afraid of the silence that would follow.