Work Text:
Why do I think of you each night?
No—
that is too modest a confession.
It is not night that summons you,
but silence.
The pause between obligations,
the soft collapse of distraction—
that narrow moment
when the world loosens its grip
and abandons me
to myself.
That is when you arrive.
I think of you draped in crimson—
not warmth, not comfort,
but something deliberate,
something worn with intent.
A color chosen
not to invite,
but to signal caution.
A warning disguised as elegance.
I think of your clinical gaze,
how it never lingers,
never softens.
It catalogs.
Dissects rather than sees,
measures rather than feels,
as though the world were a mechanism
slightly misaligned—
and you alone
knew where to apply pressure.
There is heat in the thought—
an unfamiliar pressure,
tight and restless—
and yet I cannot imagine you returning.
You would not announce yourself;
you would simply be there—
already in the room,
already in control of the variables,
as though you had never truly left.
And I wonder—
how did you know?
Was it written on my face,
my skin,
the careless arrangement of my clothes?
A flaw in the posture I practiced,
a hesitation I failed to bury?
I thought I had concealed it well,
folded it neatly beneath habit and composure,
sealed it behind practiced indifference.
But you saw it instantly.
Whatever it was—
the doubt,
the hunger for understanding,
the fracture I refused to name—
you found it without effort,
as if it had always been obvious
to the right kind of eyes.
And now, in the quiet,
when there is nothing left
to distract me from myself,
I confront the truth
I would never speak aloud:
that part of me
wants to be uncovered.
To be your next hypothesis,
your careful disassembly.
You possess knowledge
that stretches beyond human patience,
beyond mercy—
and I am haunted by the certainty
that you could unravel me,
strip me to first principles,
and remake me
in the span of an afternoon.
Whether I would survive the result
is a question
I am no longer certain
I wish answered.