a climate for doubt
i have been rehearsing the architecture of leaving, though no one ever informed me that departures could bloom before the body moves. hatred, i discover, does not arrive with thunder. it sediments. it gathers beneath the tongue like iron in well water until every attempt to speak tastes faintly of rust. perhaps i do not hate you at all. perhaps i have only grown exhausted from knocking on a door that keeps mistaking my hands for weather.
every unanswered question develops another rib. eventually it becomes an animal large enough to sleep beside me. i feed it with the hours between your replies, with the punctuation i invent on your behalf, with every sentence i convince myself you almost said. by morning it has learned my breathing better than i have.
my mind has become unreliable terrain. there are afternoons when i mistake delirium for sunlight, when every window appears capable of forgiving me, and there are evenings when the walls begin preserving echoes that were never spoken aloud. something pale has nested inside my thoughts. i cannot name it without making it more real. it grazes quietly, leaving behind immaculate bones where certainty used to stand. i wake believing i have misplaced an organ, only to remember it was faith.
doubt has outgrown suspicion. it has become climate.
it drifts beneath my skin the way groundwater remembers a drought, invisible until the fields begin collapsing. my stomach has forgotten the difference between hunger and grief. each ache translates itself into another language before i can answer it. if there exists a physician for this particular inheritance, i imagine they would prescribe an alphabet untouched by your name.
still, i continue returning to you.
not because you call me back, but because absence is an accomplished ventriloquist. it borrows your voice. it arranges your silhouette inside every quiet room until solitude becomes another species of haunting. you arrive most faithfully when you are nowhere at all. smoke has always understood this. it lingers with greater conviction than fire.
sometimes i wonder whether betrayal precedes the wound. whether it is already folded into the blueprint, waiting patiently beneath fresh paint, smiling through the wallpaper until the house remembers what it was built to become.
i long for your words with the caution of someone approaching a cathedral already consumed by ivy. i could ask for tenderness, but something unseen closes its fingers around my throat before language reaches daylight. perhaps i have mistaken devotion for disappearance. perhaps i have spent so many seasons reducing myself that i now enter love the way dust enters abandoned churches—present, suspended, and apologizing for occupying light.
i have begun to think consciousness is carnivorous.
the more clearly i witness us, the less of myself remains uneaten. every realization removes another small country from the map of my body. i cannot decide whether knowledge is a lantern or merely a cleaner method of burning. there are nights when i believe i could survive either your absence or your presence, but never the narrow kingdom between them, where every heartbeat is cross-examined and every silence is mistaken for prophecy.
if i become unbearable, know that it did not happen all at once.
erosion has always preferred patience.
even mountains spend centuries learning the language of falling.









