There is something very intimate about making the world small enough for only two people.
There’s you.
There’s me.
I don’t need to say your name. There’s only you.
You don’t need to say mine. There’s only me.
The door can close. The room can go quiet. Everything else can stay outside for a while.
The sheets can wrinkle around us.
Your warmth can wander across the middle sometime in the night and become mine before either of us notices.
My foot finds yours beneath the blanket.
Your breathing changes, and somehow I know.
This is what closeness does, I think.
It makes another person feel less like someone beside you and more like part of the air itself.
There are other women in the world.
Of course there are.
But for him, there is only her.
There are other men.
But inside her world, there is only him.
Not because everyone else has vanished.
But because attention has gathered itself so completely in one place.
To be held in your gaze until the rest of the room goes soft around the edges.
To be known through nearness.
Through the way your hand searches for mine without asking.
The way I can tell from your silence whether to move closer.
The small habits I no longer think to explain because, by now, they belong to both of us.
Stay close long enough and something between us starts to give.
Your sadness settles somewhere in me.
My laughter loosens something in you.
Your touch feels like recognition.
My body has learned the shape of yours.
People talk about becoming one.
I’m not sure I want that.
I think I would miss the tenderness of there still being two of us.
Two bodies.
Two minds.
Two separate worlds choosing, again and again, to lean toward each other.
Perhaps that is why fitting together can feel like such a wonder.
Not because there was never a seam between us.
But because there was.
And somehow, when we meet there, it feels exactly right.
Where one ends…
and the other begins.