Always Watching, Always Yours.

26 M INFJ For your eyes.

[thepryingeye]

[constantlyfalling]

❤️🩷💜💙

[snuffsite]

Show me your teeth and I'll tilt my head back to give you more access to my neck.

[thepryingeye]

Water Damage

The house was my grandparents' before it was mine. Some nights I suspect it's still theirs, and I'm only allowed to stay. My things sit stacked on their dressers and spill from their drawers — a life I've never finished packing away, resting on top of theirs. Even my clothes in the closet smell faintly of a cologne I never bought.

The heat of the night sits in my room — the master's bedroom — like grief in a family, smothering and staying.

The ceiling fan turns; the box fan whirrs on the dresser; between them they only push the heat around the room. Relocation, not relief. I lie in the middle of the mattress while sweat beads at my hairline and slides. Too hot to sleep, too late for anything else.

I am not at peace. I haven't been for hours — longer, if I'm honest. Long enough.

Where the wall meets the ceiling, in the corner of my eye, there's a small stain. Water damage, old. The leak was sealed years ago — my folks saw to that, or paid someone who did — but the stain outlives its cause. I've slept beneath that shape for years without once asking what made it. I ask tonight, for no better reason than the hour.

My cousin's ceiling did the same thing the year we all learned what he'd been doing on the side; I only noticed his stain after I'd heard the rest. And it's in heat like this that the rain finally breaks — that night and this one. Rain doesn't relieve heat like this. It underlines it.

For the better part of an hour it pours. Fat drops slap the shingles, slipping and spilling, helpless the whole way down — and I understand that helplessness better than I'd like. The rain is falling in love with the roof and drowning it in the same motion. The roof holds; it was mended for exactly this. My own architecture was never so thoroughly seen to.

Lightning — one white instantaneous insight arriving before the thought that names it — and the room shows me to myself: a grown man prone in his own bed, arms locked around a pillow, reading text messages like scripture.

She did this to me.

Four hours ago she sent a message I had to read twice, and then — goodnight. Just that:

I want you desperate tonight, imagining your cock stretching me open, filling me with your cum, saying my name. Goodnight x.

In that sweet, mannered way of hers — and then she sleeps while I do this. It still jars me, every time, what comes out of that pretty little mouth. Reading it again, my stomach lurches, sweetly, and my pulse throbs against the mattress.

She sends photos, too. Never nude, never explicit — just enough that she never quite leaves my head. Even her ordinary selfies arrive in fragments: only her soft pink lips, or only her eyes — fuck, her eyes. That stare is pure hunger, and it asks the same silent question every time:

You like this, don't you?

I always do.

Don't you want more?

I always will.

She's told me more than once, always half-laughing, that I frighten her a little — and in the same breath she asks for more of whatever does the frightening. I used to think that was a contradiction. It isn't. Hurt and comfort, fright and calm, strike at once.

My hands slide over the satin and it gives that small protesting hiss — hands too rough for fabric like this, snagging the weave — and I imagine her shivering under exactly this roughness. I answer with a low groan meant for her ears. I drag my jaw slow across the pillowcase, stubble rasping, the fabric receiving what her cheek can't. Her neck can't. This is the shoulder, I tell myself. This, the small of her back. This — her slutty little waist — and the satin hisses again as my hands close around it.

I say her name. Twice. Three times, louder — she asked for that. Ordered it, technically. And it works the way prayer is supposed to and never does: each saying brings her nearer, until the satin is skin and a spill of black hair.

The heat sits low in me, patient as banked embers, and my hips have started without me — a slow grind into the cool of the sheet. Satin, I'm learning, is a cruel surface: friction that promises and withholds. Like her. When I shift, there it is beneath me — a small dark stain where I've soaked through.

I should be ashamed. I am ashamed. It changes nothing — no, worse: the shame inflames me. My hips quicken as if to prove the point.

I roll up enough to work a hand beneath me. Slick already. My thumb slides over the tip and my breath snags on her name — quieter now, half whimper and half whisper — wishing the thumb were her tongue.

I press two fingers into the slickness and bring them to my mouth — I am that far gone — sucking my own fingers and calling the taste hers. It's a forgery. Salt, skin, wishful thinking. I know. I do it anyway.

Face into the satin, I breathe in: detergent, my own skin, rain through the screen. Nothing else. Everything near. The one thing not here. I know her in fragments — lips, eyes, voice. I know that voice down to the phone's compression. I know her punctuation, when she's being a cutesy nerd and when she's laying bait. But I don't know what she smells like, and you can't imagine a scent you've never—

I whimper into the pillow, furious about it and far too close to stop.

So the body takes over where the mind fails. Hips faster, tighter, rhythm gone frantic; the bed keeps the count — a creak and a sway, a creak and a sway — and I bite the pillow where her neck should be, and there: the second lightning of the night, no thunder to announce it.

For a second I stop being a man and become the motion itself — no distance left between the wanting and the having — the dissolution the mystics describe and the desperate keep rediscovering by accident.

I finish like that, face-down, imagining myself buried in her cunt, taking her the way she'd demand to be taken: spine bowing, hips jerking, spilling over, thick and hot against the satin — the leak becomes a flood — and I gasp into the pillow, wishing she could hear what she does to me, dragging breath back through my teeth in the aftershocks.

Thunder at last — a roar arriving late for its own lightning. The rain keeps on. Somewhere above me in the dark, the stain holds its place, and for once I don't mind.

I reach for my phone. No new messages. Of course — she's away for now, innocent as a knife in a drawer.

Still, I need to read it again.

[plkadawts]

i adore mutual obsession. tell me everything. your dreams, your favorite songs, the weird things you noticed today, anything. i want all of it. especially if we're both blowing up each other's phones because we can't stop talking, that's the dream!

[momkiss]

──ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ you never have to earn anything from me. everything i am is already yours.

[thepryingeye]

The Sunflower In The Ditch

On the road returning home, I came upon a sunflower growing in the ditch across from the tobacco field. The grasses around it rose thick and tall and broad-leafed, and still the flower stood above them, its face turned toward the light. Sunflowers were my grandmother’s favorite; my grandfather was a life-long smoker. And so there they were — the two of them, estranged though keeping company, just as they did in life. They stood alongside my way, reminding me their love is eternal.

[iqrajafzal]

أنت جميلة مثل قلبك.

You are, as beautiful as your heart is.

[thepryingeye]

I am driving down a road in the middle of the night. The area feels familiar, though I know I have never driven here before; it looks so much like the roads around my home. I want to recognize it, but I cannot. Roads end abruptly. Streetlights illuminate nothing. Mailboxes stand with no houses behind them. Some houses float four feet above the earth, the trees around them growing full and thick though inches apart in places, the ground wholly devoid of them in others. The road itself feels alive, winding beneath the car as though it shifts only to unsettle me.

I have driven on bad roads before—washed-out roads, roads that should have been condemned years before anyone got around to condemning them—and I know the particular feeling of neglect. This is not that.

A neglected road fails in ordinary ways: potholes, broken shoulders, a missing sign here or there. This road fails as though something is actively unmaking it while I pass over it, correcting itself behind me into a shape it had not yet decided on before I arrived. I keep checking the rearview mirror, not because I expect to see something following me, but because I want to know whether the road behind looks the same as the road ahead. Every time I look, I cannot remember well enough to be sure.

I search for one fixed detail I can anchor myself to—the turn before the church, the gas station that closes at nine, the street near the house—but everything changes before I can grasp it. A mailbox becomes a mailbox with no house behind it. A house becomes one floating above the earth it should be standing on.

If this were simply strange, I could accept it and drive on. It is not strange. It is mine, almost. The darkness hangs over the road, a fog with weight to it, not the mere absence of light. I press harder on the accelerator.

I do not know when I started seeing the dark as something with an appetite, only that once I did, I could not stop. It does not merely fail to illuminate. It feeds on what does, drawing the light inward past the edges of my headlights the way water swallows a stone—first the ripple, then the absence.

The road ahead is never lit so much as briefly defended.

I turn on my high beams.

Because if I turn around, I do not know where I will be driving back to. Closer to home or farther from it, I cannot say. I am grateful for a full tank of gas, but what if I run dry somewhere in this endless maze?

Turning around requires a destination, and I do not have one. Forward at least offers the illusion of progress. I have driven for what feels like miles, though I cannot know, because nothing here remains fixed long enough to measure distance against. No mile markers. No cross streets. No landmarks. I cannot tell whether this is one road or many roads pretending to be one, looping behind me somewhere unseen, or simply more of itself forever.

The tank is full.

I keep returning to that fact, it holds the anxieties at bay, pressing against my thoughts until it resembles comfort. I am frightened by how much relief I am willing to take from something so small.

Then I realize I could call my father.

Maybe he will answer.

But what if he is angry?

He will be angry if I am lost. Angry that we left. Angry that we came back.

The road grows rougher beneath the tires, twisting tighter with each turn until the wheel fights my hands.

He will be angry no matter what I do. There has never been a version of coming home where coming home was enough. Every explanation I have ever offered him became another thing to answer for—that I needed an explanation at all, that I had allowed things to become explainable. I no longer know whether I am more afraid of being lost or of being found.

The resignation settles over me. This argument did not begin tonight. It did not begin on this road, and it will not end here either. Every excuse I have ever given him required pre-justifying before it was allowed to become an excuse at all. Was I careless? Was I late? Was I somewhere I should not have been? Did I choose this?

I did not choose this road.

I did not choose any of this.

I repeat it to myself, though I do not believe it will matter. It never has before. I do not know why a world of floating houses and hungry darkness should prove more reasonable than the one I left.

To hell with it.

I scramble for my phone.

The darkness has begun soaking into the car. Even with the screen lit, the phone blurs in my hands. The clock has become unreadable. Still, my thumb finds the passcode. Habit survives where thought cannot. I open my contacts. A sharp, cold stings the back of my hand, like holding it outside a car’s window during heavy rain.

I curse, hissing through clenched teeth.

The darkness entered the vehicle slow enough to be ignored until suddenly I noticed the pool at my feet, rising through every seam, entering through every opening. Within minutes I cannot tell where the darkness beyond the windshield ends and the darkness inside the car begins. The phone is the only warm, solid thing I have left—or it is until I lift it closer to my face and find the screen submerged like everything else.

Even numbers refuse themselves. The clock no longer holds a time, only the suggestion of one, the digits sliding forward and back and settling on nothing. My thumb continues its work without my eyes.

The phone rings.

Once.

Twice.

Perhaps he is making me wait. He should have called me twenty times by now. I never heard a vibration. Never saw a missed call. I sigh, expecting the practiced civility of his voicemail—

"Elizabeth, what's wrong?"

"Dad?"

"Why aren't you home?"

I drop the phone into my lap.

"I got lost. I don't know where I am—"

"Why didn't you call me sooner?"

"I'm sorry. I thought I could—"

"That's your problem. You always think, but never do."

There it is.

"What you should've done was swallow your damn pride and ask for help sooner."

I glance down. The light from the screen has folded in on itself, a slow spiral winding tighter than the screen has room for. Beautiful. I might have used it as a wallpaper for my phone.

The darkness grows, swallowing it.

"…Are you even listening to—"

Silence.

“Damn.”

I throw the phone into the passenger seat, where it disappears. When my hand returns to the wheel. Two-thirds of the wheel remains. My hand is dissolving, the way smoke dissipates into the wind.

I watch it happen. I feel the pain, but distantly, as though it belongs to someone else. Some part of me has already decided this is owed. Of everything the road has taken tonight, the failed phone call bothers me most. Somehow less than the floating houses. Even less so than the impossible trees. Yet somehow heavier than either. Of course. Of course nothing I reached for was ever going to be the answer.

I hoped that once I reached him, once I heard his voice, the road would make some kind of sense—or at least I would not be alone in it.

My hand grows colder.

The cold does not spread so much as climb, pouring into my veins with deliberate patience. It reaches farther up my arm. I scream silently. My mouth stretches too wide. My lips pull back farther than they should. My teeth rattle in my gums. Then one falls free.

Then another.

A couple more.

Then the rest.

They drop, root and all, into the darkness pooled in my lap, and the darkness receives each one without a sound, as though it had been waiting all along for me to begin handing pieces of myself over.

I begin hearing whispers

No—

They have always been there.

Now I can hear them clearly.

"Keep going."

"Faster."

"Just look behind you."

The voices contradict one another without ever arguing. They arrive tangled together, each certain of itself, convinced it knows how this will end. They are not offering choices. They are trying to prove there are none.

Maybe I should stop fighting. The darkness will win no matter what I do. If I make it easier, perhaps it will hurt less. I cannot think anymore. I want warmth. The cold and the dark have become the same thing.

I have believed long enough that resistance changes nothing. Oftentimes, giving up feels like mercy to oneself. I knew that logic long before tonight. I have heard it in other rooms, in other arguments. The voices in my head do not sound unfamiliar. They sound like something I was taught.

I imagine coming to a stop, parking, and letting go of the wheel. Letting the darkness rise. Letting the cold finish what it started. It would be so much less work. I am so tired of the work. I want to rest my legs more than I want to survive this road, I want to stop deciding anything about it. That frightens me more than the darkness itself, because it is not new. I see now. I recognize this darkness — these shapes without shape — from places that were not roads at all:

The holes my father would leave in the wall;

The bottoms of bottles after swearing “never again”;

The leering eyes on the street, ceasing after puberty.

The hole in my heart where hope once lived.

If the dark is going to take me, it will not take me as I am. I slam the accelerator to the floor. I cannot see the road anymore, but I know where it wants me to go, and I refuse. I wrench the wheel toward the trees that I know are waiting beyond the shoulder and close my eyes before I can watch myself do it. Wet tires scream. My forehead strikes the dashboard with a crack. A high ringing, everywhere at once.

Then silence.

The smell of iron.

Warm blood runs into my eyes.

Pain, already growing distant.

In the last moment before the tree, there is a strange and perfect clarity. I am not choosing to die, even now. I am choosing the only thing the road did not offer and cannot claim: the manner of my ending.

No matter what — the darkness awaits me.

I only decided who I would be when it takes me.

[thepryingeye]

The Green Man

The Wood recalls in womb-dark silence the entombed root and seed— recall all green glories beneath the quiet, frosted floor.

Then a nymph—or call her hunger that the green world wears as woman— slips between the birches, beckoning; she does not flee as prey, but as proof, as provocation: there is nothing in her human, only appetite and argument that he must earn his way.

She pauses at the birches, a patient choir. Turns. Says nothing. Lets the silence speak for her.

“Follow,” says she, “if you dare to; I am not a bloom for breaking, not a thing that bends and offers; I am a storm you must pursue. Spend yourself upon the chasing—prove the wanting worth the taking; what is given without labor is a gift not worth its due.”

“Follow,” says she, low as loam, “if you would earn what I am offering; I am not a bloom for bending, not a bough that bows and begs. What is given without labor is a gift not worth the proffering; spend yourself upon the chasing—I will not be taken by the dregs.

I am storm, and you must meet me; I am flood, and you must ford me; prove the wanting worth the having, prove the having worth the wound. Not as prey do I present me—but as proof: so come toward me, not because I run, but because what runs from you has never swooned.”

He arises, ancient, antlered—older than the names of God; ivy crowns him, vine anoints him, and the sap, no longer hardened, climbs the column of his body like a prayer that seeks its rod.

Then—the chase; and all the woodland blurs to breathing, blurs to burning, root and bramble bent like bow-strings, birch and beech all blazing by; he behind her, hard and hungry, every sinew stretched and straining, she before him, fleet as foxfire, laughing back a lullaby.

“Closer~” “Closer~” A breath between them.

Less than breath.

His fingers find the small of her—that valley, velvet, violet-scented— and her laughter snags on gasping as they stumble, as they fall; and the moss receives them softly, as a bed too long lamented, and the canopy above them draws its curtain over all.

Kiss for kiss, a clean communion; tooth for tooth, the oldest testament— and her teeth that find his shoulder sing a hymn, not a surrender; and his teeth that trace her collarbone inscribe a consecrated sentiment, blessing what they bruise, bruising what they bless, fierce and tender.

Where he bites, the bruises blossom into purple-plush hibiscus, blooming where the blood has gathered, darkened—red gone sacred, gone to wine; where she claws, the welts grow green—not scarring now but looming into leaf, as if the body were a trellis for the vine.

The pollen falls upon them like a gold the dusk is grieving, chrism for the joined and groaning, gilding flank and hollow, hair and ground; every grapple grafts a garden; every gasp is green believing; what is opened is the furrow; what is spent, the seed; what dies, the sound that will wake as birdsong.

And the ground beneath their labor breaks its long-kept fast in flowers— not a chaos but a lexicon; each blossom is a word the green world could not speak until the rite had run its hours, until the wound had found its wanting, and the wanting found it heard:

roses, red as what is owed—red as mouths, red as the ache of arrival; blue hydrangeas, patient in their blue devotion, faithful past the point of reason, keeping vigil for faith’s sake; forget-me-nots, that swear—as only lovers swear—with the whole of their emotion;

spider lilies, crimson-curled, for every dying and its after— resurrection knotted into every thread of the undone; lilac for the first of loving, for that inaugural, exquisite laughter of the ache before the kiss, when everything is almost, and the almost is the sun;

queen of night, who keeps her rapture for a single hour of splendor, gives herself entire—and closes; one night’s offering is her all; baby’s breath, for breath to come, for lungs not yet made tender, for the futures folded, sleeping, in the pollen’s golden fall;

and—the darkest, and the sweetest—chocolate cosmos, scented as a sin one would confess and then commit again, and then confess; breathing sweetness into dusk the way a censer, unrelented, breathes its smoke toward a heaven it has never seen, and loves no less.

Hush. The forest holds. Even the wind has knelt to witness.

Here the little death they die together.

[thepryingeye]

Tumbler

I am the vessel built to hold the heat —

I pour by day the nightly overflowing.

Held close against her breast — never discreet.

The warmth will permeate the vessel wholly.

The tumbler — thirsts though overflowing, spills.

Falling fast — head over heels — intended as a verb.

Surrendering, helpless, to the recall

Of those outpouring, avid, thoughtful words.

I am the lock you picked with patient hands,

Each pin left trembling at the shear line.

The one key turns — and resistance no longer stands;

The bolt slides sudden, wet — unlocks the mind.

So the tumbler tumbles down the endless blue,

The scroll that strips us, anonymous and bare.

And there, the one whose hunger answered true —

Dropped, overflowing, the tumbler comes undone

There.

The churning of the fall — slow heat at the center,

Like a fever one would beg not to break, ever;

So fill me, boiling — and only you will know

A heat too good to quench. Let it overflow.

Pour me. Pick me. Turn me until I yield.

I’ve practiced every way of going down.

Catch the spill, or don’t — without a lid or seal.

I want the ground. I want to go down.