want, as language.

i want to hold your mouth in mine — not like a kiss so much as a taking, a small theft. and i did. i used to cup it like a fragile thing and asked you to speak until the letters were raw. i once whispered, tell me every terrible thing you’ve done, not to punish you but to learn the geography of your ruins. i wanted to trace the map of your mistakes with my tongue and memorize each crooked street. i wanted to run down them. not away from you, but into you. into those dark, unknown places, until the familiarity became streetlights that blurred into home.

and you told me once, halting, like someone who had rehearsed the right amount of shame. you handed me the small, used moments: the lies that felt necessary, the tenderness withheld like currency, the ways you learned to fold yourself down. i tasted ash and honey and something older — the shame that came to you tied in a ribbon from your mother, the hot copper anger your father pressed into your mouth like a coin. i swallowed it because swallowing felt like work i could do for you. i still foolishly hold that burning coal in the pit of my belly to remind me of the warmth of your hands. to bring the outside inside because it will never look the same again. it is now too fragile to leave on my front porch waiting, pawing at the door, begging to be let in. it is now too weak to wait.

sometimes i imagined the shame as flavored syrup that i never learned the recipe for. i revisit the taste, the inheritances, that never belonged to me but have stuck to you like lint. i try to spit them out and find they taste familiar — like my own family table, like the old radio my mother kept tuned to worry. the border between yours and mine blurs until i no longer know which grief i am carrying and which grief i stole. i am not sure you still grieve at all. i am not sure you ever did. you always turned your face from honesty because it reminded you too much of your father. too much of the words he will never say to you.

despite everything, despite you breaking my heart once and twice and then again for good measure, i want to take your grief and build a home with it. i draw blueprints on napkins at two in the morning: a kitchen for apologies, a window for the days we forgive ourselves, a small room that will only hold the things we promise to mend, a library with two easels in the corner and our shoes placed together so we can mirror the rot we share. in my mind, we move our things in like squatters, stacking old regrets into boxes and labeling them with ridiculous hope. the place smells of smoke and old wool and the way you laugh when you pretend not to be afraid.

i light a hearth because it feels like an English word for safety. a word your own language does not have a good translation for. one you never taught me, not fully at least. i tried to learn on my own, but they never felt right in my mouth. the fire is both ceremony and instrument. i push my hands toward it, not to burn you but to test whether heat can be used like a scalpel — to cauterize, to warm, to reveal. you sit across from me and watch. sometimes the flames give up what is inside you, charred and honest; sometimes they only smoke and leave the hearts of things the same.

i want to find you in the that and pull you back out. this is a phrase that sounds heroic on paper, but in bed it is smaller: the memory of a hand beneath your spine, a thumb at the nape of your neck, the slow, deliberate lifting that says, i am here. in my memories, you are heavier than i expected. you are a collection of small pieces that refuse to be recomposed exactly the same way. i press you close to my chest and pretend my ribs are a sanctuary instead of the cage you died in.

there are nights when the house creaks under the weight of us and the grief settles like dust in the corners. i sweep with my lips, with my hands, with the steady insistence of staying. we stuff blankets into cupboards labeled not yet and soon. we feed the fire with memories until it’s all glowing and dangerous and somehow, in that light, you look less like a threat and more like a person who has been through weather. we let them char and poke at them just to remind ourselves that they are dead and we will soon die and they will no longer exist.

in the dead of night i whisper, maybe to you, maybe to who you were, maybe to no one at all — i want, i want, i want — and the repetition sounds like a prayer and a warning. wanting is its own labor: the dragging of a cart full of hope up a hill that may not exist. i tell myself these wants are generous; sometimes they hide hunger. i cannot help this wanting. this relentless and unforgiving want to be the place you come to when you forget how to arrive anywhere else. i want to be the map and the harbor and the stubborn lighthouse. the waves of you, of who we were, are slowly taking the soft edges of me and pulling them out to sea. the sea that you crossed six times. perhaps six times too many. perhaps never again. perhaps that is what you want, what you need. i will offer it to you, the never. if it makes your life easier.

when the warm georgia mornings came and we were both messy with sleep and old words, you often said something that might’ve been apology or might’ve been exhaustion and i folded it into the day’s plans. i pressed my mouth to yours not as a question but as an answer. an answer to the questions you never asked. the questions that will still never come. the taste of your confession lingers in the back of my throat — nicotine pouches, orange peels, the metallic aftertaste of something you will not name. yet, i swallow again because swallowing has become my way of believing.

i am learning to hold without flattening, to carry without absorbing every bruise. sometimes i fail and wake with the imprint of your grief on my skin like a stamp. other times i succeed and the house we made keeps its shape through rain. either way i keep building because building is how i speak my love: messy, insistently, with too many hands and not enough plans.

i want. i want. i want — and in the echo of that last want i understand the plain arithmetic of care: you gave me your worst and i still try to turn it into shelter. it is a foolish barter maybe, but it was ours. we exchanged what breaks us for what might, with terrible luck and better medicine, hold us together for one more second. in a language we both understand.

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As always, stay safe, stay warm, and stay kind.

Best regards,

Zoe.