The couch knows all my dirty little secrets. It has caught every tear, every drunken confession, every evening I’ve spent pretending the television was company and the silence was something I deliberately invited into my life. It has witnessed the spectacular collapse of my ambitions, the slow deterioration of my social skills, and the occasional conversation I’ve had with the refrigerator because apparently we’ve reached a point in this relationship where even the appliances understand me better than most human beings. The couch doesn’t judge. It doesn’t ask why I haven’t showered, why the curtains remain closed, or why dinner consists of potato chips and whatever questionable substance I found hiding in the back of the pantry. It simply welcomes my miserable carcass like an old accomplice in a murder neither of us intends to discuss.
The bed, however, is an entirely different creature. A cold, unforgiving institution of psychological warfare. It acknowledges my existence, permits me to sleep, and then spends eight uninterrupted hours reminding me of every mistake I’ve ever made. I swear the mattress has a degree in psychology and a personal vendetta against my happiness. The pillows know things that would destroy marriages, the blankets have witnessed crimes against personal hygiene, and somewhere beneath the fitted sheet lies the last remaining shred of my enthusiasm for being alive before nine in the morning.
People keep telling me to get out more. Meet somebody. Experience life. Go somewhere exciting. Apparently, the world is full of wonderful opportunities waiting for me to participate in them. How delightful. Perhaps I should put on a pair of pants, comb the cemetery dust out of my personality, and venture into society where strangers can disappoint me in person instead of through a glowing rectangular screen. What an adventure. What a magnificent opportunity to discover that people are just as exhausting outside as they are inside.
Besides, I’ve developed a rather comfortable arrangement with my misery. We don’t argue about the future, we don’t discuss expectations, and neither of us has to pretend to be particularly interesting. Misery knows my schedule. It understands my dietary habits. It doesn’t complain when I cancel plans or when my idea of an exciting Saturday night involves moving from one end of the couch to the other. Frankly, it’s the healthiest relationship I’ve had in years.
And perhaps that’s the saddest part. I’ve become so accustomed to the company of things that cannot leave me that I’ve started confusing comfort with happiness. The couch doesn’t promise me forever, the television doesn’t pretend to understand my feelings, and the potato chips have never once suggested that I should work on myself. There is something beautifully honest about objects that make absolutely no promises.
So I’ll stay here a little longer, nestled between the cushions and the accumulated evidence of my questionable life decisions. The couch loves me, the bed merely acknowledges me, and somewhere out there the world is having a wonderful time without my participation.
Give it my regards.
I’m busy being the most disappointing houseguest in my own existence, and honestly, I’ve never felt more at home.
My mistress wants me and my wife needs me, and somewhere between those two miserable truths I’ve managed to lose the bastard I used to be. One looks at me like I’m the last cigarette in a burning building, something worth destroying herself for, while the other looks at me like a house with a leaking roof, a broken furnace, and a mortgage that refuses to die. My mistress wants the man underneath the clothes, the one with the crooked smile and the dirty imagination, the one who still believes there might be something beautiful left to ruin. My wife needs the man who remembers to pay the bills, take out the garbage, fix the goddamn kitchen faucet, and pretend that growing old together was always supposed to feel like a slow execution. And me? I’m somewhere in the middle, chewing on the bones of my own contradictions, wondering when the hell I became a man with two women and not enough of himself to give either one.
My mistress doesn’t ask about the electric bill. She doesn’t care whether the lawn needs mowing or whether the refrigerator is making that strange noise again. She doesn’t want a spreadsheet of my responsibilities or a detailed explanation of why I came home late. She wants my hands, my mouth, my attention, my madness. She wants the version of me that doesn’t have to explain why he sometimes stares into the darkness like he’s waiting for somebody to come collect him. She makes me feel wanted, and there’s a dangerous difference between being wanted and being needed. One is a fire; the other is a funeral procession. One makes you feel like a goddamn king, the other reminds you that somebody has to carry the coffin.
My wife knows the geography of my disappointments. She’s seen me sick, broke, exhausted, angry, and defeated. She’s heard the things I never intended to say and remembers the promises I made when the world was younger and we still believed that love could outrun time. She knows how I take my coffee, where I hide my frustrations, and the particular silence that comes over me when something has gone wrong. She doesn’t need to ask whether I’m hurting. She can read it in the way I close a cabinet or how long I stand in the shower. There’s a history there that no stranger could manufacture, a thousand ordinary moments stitched together with invisible thread. And perhaps that’s the cruelest part. She needs me because we’ve built something together, and I know exactly how much destruction my selfishness could bring to it.
I hate myself for the arithmetic. I hate that I’ve started measuring affection like a fucking accountant, calculating what I receive against what I owe, tallying kisses against obligations, desire against responsibility. How many nights does a man have to spend pretending before he starts believing his own performance? How many times can he say everything is fine before the words become a prison sentence? I want to blame the women, naturally. That’s the convenient thing about being a coward; there’s always somebody nearby to blame for the mess you’ve made. My mistress is temptation. My wife is expectation. And I’m the poor son of a bitch caught between them, apparently unaware that I’m the one holding the match.
Sometimes I wonder whether my mistress loves me or simply loves the absence of ordinary life that I represent. Perhaps she loves the stolen hours, the anticipation, the secret conversations, the illusion that a man can be separated from his consequences. Perhaps she doesn’t know what I look like when I’m standing in the kitchen at midnight, staring at an unpaid bill and wondering whether my life has become a collection of obligations with a pulse. She gets the poetry. My wife gets the plumbing. She gets the whiskey and the midnight confessions. My wife gets the morning after, when the romance has crawled into a corner and left its dirty laundry on the floor.
And God help me, sometimes I resent my wife for knowing me so well. There is no mystery left to hide behind. She has seen the boy, the fool, the ambitious bastard, the man who wanted to conquer the world and the man who eventually learned that the world doesn’t give a damn about his ambitions. She knows the scars beneath my sarcasm. She knows the difference between my laughter and my pretending. My mistress sees a man worth chasing. My wife sees a man worth staying beside. I don’t know which one frightens me more.
There are nights when I imagine walking away from everything, leaving behind the keys, the photographs, the familiar arguments, and the comfortable little grave we’ve decorated with family memories. I imagine driving until the roads run out of names, finding some roadside bar where nobody knows my history, and introducing myself with a different face. But I know myself better than that. I’d take my ghosts with me. They’d sit in the passenger seat, complain about the music, and ask whether I remembered to lock the front door. You can change your address, but you cannot outrun the bastard in the driver’s seat.
And what of the mistress? What happens when the stolen hours become ordinary hours? When desire has to share a bathroom with toothpaste and unpaid bills? When the woman who once wanted every piece of me discovers that I come with a thousand irritating pieces she never ordered? Will she still want me when there’s nothing forbidden about touching me? Will she still find poetry in my madness when she’s the one cleaning up after it? Or will I become another man who promises the moon and delivers a dim porch light?
I am angry because I want everything, and I know that wanting everything is how a man ends up with nothing. I want to be desired without being destructive. I want to be needed without feeling imprisoned. I want somebody to look at me and see more than the responsibilities I’ve accumulated, but I also want to stop running from the people who have loved me through the unremarkable disasters of being alive. It’s an ugly appetite, this hunger to be both somebody’s salvation and somebody’s escape. It makes a man feel powerful until he realizes he’s simply become another source of pain.
Perhaps the real mistress is not a woman at all. Perhaps she’s the version of myself I’ve abandoned, the reckless bastard who still believes there is a life beyond the walls he’s built. Perhaps my wife is not merely the woman waiting at home, but the entire history I’ve spent years constructing, the promises, the sacrifices, the ordinary miracles that don’t announce themselves with fireworks. And perhaps I’m the one having the affair with the fantasy that I can have a new life without burying the old one.
My mistress wants me. My wife needs me. And I stand here like a beautifully dressed disaster, confusing attention with salvation and responsibility with a death sentence. I could write a thousand poems about desire, a thousand more about the cruelty of love, but none of them would absolve me. There is no romantic redemption in making two women carry the weight of a man’s inability to confront himself.
So tonight, I’ll sit with the uncomfortable truth. The mirror doesn’t care who wants me. It doesn’t care who needs me. It only reflects the man standing there, with his excuses hanging from his shoulders like a wet funeral suit. And for once, I might have to stop asking which woman makes me feel more alive and start asking why I’ve become so willing to make a mess of other people’s lives just to avoid confronting my own.
What a magnificent fucking tragedy.
Two women, one man, and not nearly enough courage to tell the truth.
Some people grow older without ever growing. Time touches their faces, changes their bodies, buries people they once loved, and gives them years they mistake for wisdom. But beneath it all, they remain children in the darkest sense, ruled by impulse, protected by pride, and completely unaware of the damage they leave behind.
They walk through life carrying a mirror they never dare to look into. Instead, they hold it toward everyone else. They study the flaws of others with an almost religious devotion, searching for imperfections that might distract from the emptiness staring back at them. They can tell you everything that is wrong with another person, yet remain completely incapable of recognizing the poison within themselves.
They lack the awareness to understand that every wound does not make them a victim. Sometimes they are the wound. Sometimes they are the reason someone stopped speaking, stopped trusting, stopped believing, or quietly disappeared. But accountability requires a depth of honesty they have never developed. So they rewrite the story until they are innocent again.
They call their cruelty honesty. They call their anger passion. They call their selfishness independence. They call their inability to communicate a personality trait. They call their refusal to change standing their ground. They have a name for everything except the truth.
The truth is that emotional intelligence requires humility. It requires sitting alone with the parts of yourself you would rather bury. It requires asking what you did, what you said, what you failed to understand, and how much pain your behavior caused. It requires the terrifying realization that you may not be the hero of your own story.
Some people would rather destroy every relationship around them than face that realization.
So they continue. They repeat the same patterns with different people. They carry the same bitterness into every room and wonder why every room eventually becomes empty. They blame betrayal, jealousy, disrespect, abandonment, misunderstanding, and bad luck. Anything is easier than admitting that they have spent years becoming the very thing they claim to hate.
And perhaps that is the darkest form of ignorance. Not the inability to know, but the refusal to know. The refusal to look inward when the evidence is everywhere. The refusal to grow when life has given them every reason to.
Eventually, people stop trying to reach them. They stop explaining what should have been obvious. They stop offering pieces of themselves to someone who keeps breaking them and calling it misunderstanding.
And the person who never grew remains exactly where they have always been, surrounded by the ruins of relationships they could have saved, staring through a window at a world they believe abandoned them, never realizing that the door was never locked.
Apathy is an itch beneath the skin, a constant irritation no amount of scratching can soothe. It lingers in the quiet corners of conversations, in the hollow spaces between headlines and tragedies, in the tired shrug that follows another broken promise. Very few listen. Most only hear. Words pass through them like wind through dead branches, making noise but leaving nothing changed.
The itch grows. It crawls through crowded rooms and glowing screens, through prayers, protests, and desperate confessions. People nod, people agree, people move on. The world becomes a chorus of echoes, everyone speaking, almost no one listening.
And still the itch remains, demanding attention, demanding feeling. It is the discomfort of knowing something is wrong and watching indifference dress itself as wisdom. It is the ache of caring in a world that has learned how not to. It is the scratch that draws blood, the wound that refuses to close, the reminder that silence can be louder than any scream.
Before you give every citizen a number, give every dollar a name. Build a living ledger that does not sleep, a cathedral of code where each cent leaves a footprint in light. Let the money speak plainly—this much to classrooms, this much to concrete and steel, this much to contracts signed in quiet rooms where the ink dries faster than the truth.
Thread a bright wire through the arteries of the state. Follow the pulse from paycheck to policy, from tax form to turbine, from the small-business owner’s trembling signature to the vast machinery it feeds. Strip away the velvet language of “allocation” and “miscellaneous,” words that blur like smoke and drift into ceilings no one can see beyond.
If we are to be rendered into data—faces mapped, eyes scanned, identities distilled to digits—then let the spending be rendered just as bare. Let every mother trace her overtime into textbooks and lunches. Let every veteran follow the echo of his labor into clinics and clean water and the promises made in his name.
Map the current before you map the citizen. Illuminate the flow before you illuminate the face. Because a nation courageous enough to track every dollar in daylight may finally be worthy of holding every identity in its hands.
They told us it was progress and we believed them because the word sounded clean, because it arrived polished, glowing, humming softly like something that wouldn’t hurt us. Progress never announces its teeth. It smiles first. It promises convenience. It offers speed where patience once lived and calls the trade fair. We accepted because exhaustion makes believers out of skeptics, and hope—real or manufactured—still feels better than admitting we are being managed into silence.
Both parties swear allegiance to the people with one hand and sign contracts with the other. Red or blue, the ink dries the same. They perform outrage like theater, shouting across podiums while agreeing on everything that matters behind glass walls and catered lunches. The argument is the distraction. The unity is the danger. They know if we’re busy choosing sides, we won’t notice that the house belongs to neither of us anymore.
Billionaires don’t see the world as a place; they see it as a portfolio. Forests become assets. Water becomes futures. Human attention becomes currency. They don’t ask what something costs in lives, only what it returns in growth. They talk about legacy as if it isn’t just another brand extension, as if history hasn’t already learned their names and sharpened its knives.
Technology was supposed to save time. Instead, it ate it. Hours dissolved into feeds, thoughts flattened into content, identities reduced to data points that predict what we’ll buy before we know what we need. Machines learn faster than we do because they aren’t burdened with conscience. They don’t hesitate. They don’t grieve. They optimize without asking who gets erased in the process. And the people who own them prefer it that way.
Inflation is framed as weather—unfortunate, uncontrollable, nobody’s fault—but storms don’t selectively spare the wealthy. Prices rise with intention. Wages crawl by design. The distance between effort and survival grows wider each year, and they call it the market, as if the market isn’t a room full of people who decided this was acceptable. As if hunger were a bug instead of a feature.
Industries no longer compete; they collaborate. Energy courts war. Tech romances surveillance. Healthcare profits from never quite healing you. Food is engineered to keep you full but not nourished, alive but not well. Everything is interconnected now, except empathy. Supply chains stretch across continents, responsibility disappears into logistics, and suffering is outsourced to places we’ve been taught not to see.
Privacy died quietly, without a funeral. We traded it for convenience, handed over our inner lives in exchange for faster checkout and curated desire. Now our thoughts are mapped, our fears monetized, our anger weaponized against us. They don’t need to control us when they can predict us. They don’t need force when compliance is frictionless.
Artificial intelligence writes poems and diagnoses illness and decides who gets an interview. It mimics understanding without carrying its weight. It doesn’t know what it means to be disposable, but it’s very good at deciding who is. We trust it because it sounds confident, because it doesn’t stutter like humans do when truth gets complicated. We forget that it learned from us—from our biases, our hierarchies, our quiet cruelty dressed up as efficiency.
They call it polarization, like we woke up one day and chose to hate each other for fun. As if rage wasn’t engineered, fed, amplified because outrage keeps eyes open and hands busy. We argue with neighbors we used to borrow sugar from while corporations siphon value out of entire communities. The fight is horizontal because the theft is vertical.
Voting is sold as salvation, as if a single day every few years can undo a system designed to absorb dissent and continue unchanged. They offer us choices that never threaten power, candidates who promise reform but swear loyalty to donors. Hope is recycled, repackaged, resold. The expiration date is always after the election.
The middle class exists now as nostalgia. A myth told to keep people striving instead of questioning. Work harder, they say, as if effort alone can overcome a rigged equation. Two jobs become normal. Burnout becomes character. Rest becomes laziness. Survival becomes a personal failing instead of a systemic verdict.
Solidarity scares them. That’s why they teach us to brand ourselves, to compete, to treat each other as obstacles instead of allies. If you fail, it’s your fault. If you succeed, it proves the system works. The exceptions are paraded as evidence while the majority are buried under statistics.
Mental health is treated like a malfunction instead of a response. Download an app. Breathe through the panic. Meditate while the ground shifts beneath you. They prescribe coping mechanisms for a world that is fundamentally unwell. Healing is individual; harm is collective. That’s the trick.
Education trains obedience wrapped in ambition. You pay to learn the rules of a game that will never love you back. Debt ensures compliance. Curiosity is tolerated only when it’s profitable. History is softened so we don’t recognize ourselves in it, so we don’t notice how often this story ends the same way.
They insist technology is neutral, as if power doesn’t leave fingerprints. As if tools built for extraction will suddenly prioritize care. As if growth has ever decided it had enough. They promise a future that is always almost here, always just one more sacrifice away.
Philanthropy becomes absolution. A donation here, a foundation there, a name engraved over damage that cannot be undone. You can’t give back what was never yours to take, but they’ll accept the applause anyway.
The planet is running a fever and they argue about the cost of medicine. Fires burn. Water rises. Species vanish without press releases. They say it’s complicated. They say it’s too late. They say it’s not profitable enough to matter. Delay becomes policy. Collapse becomes background noise.
They sell green dreams powered by the same exploitation, just painted differently. Cleaner aesthetics, dirtier truths. Violence hidden behind supply chains and silence.
We are managed, not represented. Pacified, not protected. Entertained into compliance while the architecture of control tightens quietly. Left versus right keeps us busy while wealth consolidates like gravity.
And still, beneath the sarcasm, beneath the jokes, beneath the numb scrolling at midnight, something stirs. A realization sharp enough to hurt. That this is not inevitable. That this arrangement is chosen. That the future they’re designing doesn’t include most of us alive.
This is not a solution. This is a refusal. A naming of the machinery. A reminder that normal is a story told by those who benefit from it. They call that cynicism. I call it waking up.
I am not lost in the way people mean it, not wandering without direction or purpose, not broken by the absence of a map. I am simply unseen, standing in the quiet spaces where footsteps soften and names are spoken less often. There is a difference between being lost and being overlooked, between drifting and choosing to walk a road few recognize as real.
I move through days carrying questions instead of answers, and I have learned that questions weigh more. They bend the spine, slow the stride, demand pauses at intersections where certainty would have passed through without noticing. I linger there, not because I am afraid to choose, but because I understand that some paths reveal themselves only after patience has been practiced.
The world favors arrival. It celebrates destinations, milestones, the clean lines of progress drawn in ink bold enough for everyone to see. But there is no applause for becoming, for the silent labor of shaping a self in private. I am in that labor now, hands dusty, heart unfinished, building something that does not yet resemble the final structure. This work is invisible, and so am I.
There are days when the silence feels like erasure, when I wonder if existence requires witnesses to be real. I speak my name softly to remind myself that I am still here, that breath is proof enough. I remind myself that roots grow in darkness, that seeds do not announce themselves until they are ready to break the surface and claim the light.
I am not behind; I am beneath, learning the architecture of depth. While others race toward horizons, I am studying the ground, the fractures and the strength hidden inside what holds us upright. I am learning how much pressure it takes to become unmovable, how stillness can be a form of preparation rather than surrender.
Being unfound has taught me gentleness. It has taught me how to listen without interrupting, how to carry hope without demanding proof. It has taught me that worth is not measured by recognition, and that meaning does not need permission to exist. I am becoming fluent in the language of quiet persistence.
One day, perhaps, someone will look my way and think they have discovered me, as if I had been waiting in plain sight all along. They will not know the nights spent assembling courage, the mornings stitched together with resolve, the slow, deliberate faith it took to remain here without applause.
Until then, I walk on. Not lost. Not broken. Just moving through the in-between, trusting that being unfound is not failure, but a necessary season of becoming. I am not lost, just not found—and that, too, is a place worth standing.
I’m not craving attention but your lightening connection. I’m not craving lust but the magic in our distance. I desire the conversation that is entwined and pure. I’m not craving anything hollow but the hunger within your desire. I’m not craving a fixation but the beauty of your gust.
I love how you make me feel, the ecstasy burning is real. I love how the flames surrounding never seem to get low, your brilliance always has an extraordinary glow.
I’m not craving the physicality but your alluring intelligence. I’m not craving your nails but your provocative touch. I desire the thirst and the hurricane between our fire. I’m not craving your luscious skin but the magnetic pull between us.
I love how you make me feel, the magnificent sensation is real. I love how the blaze within continues to rise, your affection was always smoldering in your burgundy eyes.
At 2:35 AM, Karina Larkin is awake in the way people become awake when something inside them has already stood up and gone to the window. The house is quiet but not asleep. It breathes the low, familiar breaths of waiting—floorboards holding memory, walls keeping secrets, the refrigerator humming like a promise it never finishes. Outside, the streetlight paints the living room in pale gold, and dust drifts through it like slow snowfall. Karina sits at the edge of the couch with her feet tucked under her, hands wrapped around a mug that went cold an hour ago, listening for a sound she has been rehearsing for six months.
Six months is long enough to learn the weight of absence. Long enough for mornings to stretch and evenings to fold in on themselves. Long enough to discover which corners of a room collect loneliness and which ones refuse to let it stay. When he left, she told herself she would be brave in practical ways—pay the bills on time, water the plants, answer questions with calm certainty. She did all of that. What she did not plan for was how love behaves when it is asked to wait. How it paces. How it sharpens. How it grows more articulate with every quiet night.
She checks the time again. 2:35 AM. The numbers glow like they know something she doesn’t. The hours since midnight have been a soft procession of memories: the way his jacket always smelled like outside, the way he reached for her hand without looking, the way he said goodbye at the airport like it was a comma instead of a period. Six months ago, she stood in a crowd of departures and told herself that love could survive distance if it had somewhere to land when it came home.
Karina learned to mark time by small rituals. Coffee brewed for one. Two plates taken down, then one put back. The way the bed insisted on the shape of him long after it should have let go. She learned the sound of her own footsteps at night, the creak near the hallway that always startled her even though she expected it. She learned that courage sometimes looks like staying soft when it would be easier to harden. She learned that longing can be gentle, that it can sit beside you like a cat, purring, insistent, refusing to be ignored.
At 2:35 AM, a car passes too slowly. She lifts her head. The sound fades. Her heart settles back into its practiced rhythm. She exhales and laughs quietly at herself, a sound she has made many nights now. Hope, she has discovered, is a muscle. Use it too much and it aches. Don’t use it enough and it forgets what it’s for.
She remembers the first week he was gone, how she kept the lights on too late, how she filled the silence with television she didn’t watch. She remembers the second month, when the ache dulled into something manageable, something she could carry without announcing. She remembers the fourth month, when she found herself smiling at his name on her phone without checking the time, when absence had stopped being an emergency and started being a condition. Through it all, she kept a careful ledger of moments she would tell him about when he returned—how the neighbor’s dog learned to open the gate, how the old oak dropped a limb in a storm, how she fixed the sink herself and felt impossibly proud.
She checks the time again. Still 2:35 AM. The clock does that sometimes, holds a minute like it wants to feel important.
Karina rises and walks to the window. The street is empty, expectant. The moon hangs low, unembarrassed by its own brightness. She presses her forehead lightly against the glass and lets herself imagine him driving through the last miles, hands familiar on the wheel, thoughts finally allowed to arrive where his body is going. She imagines his smile, the one that starts on one side first, the one that always made her feel chosen even before he said anything. She imagines the weight of him crossing the threshold, how the house will recognize him before she does.
Six months ago, they made promises that were practical and unromantic. Call when you land. Text when you can. Don’t forget to eat. They didn’t say anything about rings or kneeling or forever because those words felt too fragile to ship across oceans and job sites. They trusted the quieter vows—the ones that survive weather and time zones, the ones that show up even when no one is watching.
A sound interrupts her imagining. Not loud. Not dramatic. Just a car door closing with the unmistakable certainty of arrival. Karina’s heart leaps, stumbles, rights itself. She does not run. She walks, because this moment deserves steadiness. The front door opens, and there he is, framed by the night he has finally finished traveling through. He looks thinner, older in the eyes, more himself in the way people become when they have been tested and returned intact.
They do not speak right away. They step into each other as if gravity has been rehearsing this reunion since the day he left. His arms feel exactly right, exactly remembered. Her face fits against his chest like it was designed with this purpose in mind. She breathes him in—road, work, the faint echo of places she has never been but knows intimately through his voice. The house exhales with them.
“It’s late,” she says, because someone has to say something, and because time has taught her to respect itself.
“I know,” he says, smiling into her hair. “I tried to hurry.”
They pull back just enough to look at each other, to confirm what touch already knows. His hands are warm. His eyes are wet in the way that suggests gratitude rather than sadness. He sets his bag down like it no longer matters, like the life he carried away has been successfully delivered and signed for.
They sit on the couch, the same one she has kept her company for half a year. He notices the mug, cold and abandoned. He notices the way she has changed her hair, the way she carries herself now. She notices the new lines at the corners of his mouth, the confidence that comes from surviving something difficult without becoming bitter. They talk in short bursts at first—safe details, familiar ground. How was the flight. How was the drive. Did you eat. Each question is a bridge, each answer a step closer to something larger.
At 2:35 AM, he reaches into his jacket pocket and pauses. Karina feels the air shift before she understands why. He looks at her with a seriousness that has been earning its place for months. He takes her hand, the left one, the one that has reached for him across continents without knowing it was practicing.
“I didn’t plan to do this tonight,” he says, and she knows immediately that this is not true in the way people say things to give themselves courage. “I wanted to wait until morning. I wanted it to be perfect.”
She smiles, because perfection has never been their language. She squeezes his hand, because some truths need encouragement.
“I spent six months thinking,” he continues. “About work, about distance, about what it means to come back to someone and feel like you’re coming home. I thought about the nights you stayed up, the mornings you handled alone, the way you made space for me even when I wasn’t here to fill it.”
He reaches into his pocket again and this time does not hesitate. The box is small, almost shy. He opens it with care, like he is handling something alive. The ring catches the light from the streetlamp and throws it back in a way that feels intentional, as if even metal understands ceremony.
Karina’s breath leaves her all at once. The room tilts, steadies. She feels the weight of six months compress into a single moment that asks to be answered. She thinks of the nights she went to bed early because hope was exhausting. She thinks of the mornings she woke up proud of herself for making it through another day. She thinks of the love that waited with her, patient and uncomplaining.
He lowers himself to one knee, not because tradition demands it, but because gravity does. Because some questions carry enough meaning to pull the body toward the ground.
“Karina Larkin,” he says, and the sound of her name in his mouth feels like a blessing. “Will you marry me?”
Time does something strange at 2:35 AM. It widens. It softens. It gives her room to feel everything without rushing her through any of it. She laughs first, because joy needs a release. Then she cries, because relief has been waiting a long time to speak. She nods before she answers, because her body has already decided.
“Yes,” she says, finally, clearly. “Yes. Of course.”
He slides the ring onto her finger, and the fit is exact in the way things are when they have been imagined enough times. He stands and pulls her into him, and they hold each other like people who have crossed something wide and lived to tell about it. The house watches. The streetlight approves. The clock blinks and moves on, satisfied.
Later, much later, they lie in bed and talk in the low voices of people who do not want to wake the future too soon. They plan nothing and everything. They laugh about how tired they are. They marvel at how simple it feels now that the hardest part is over. Karina traces the ring with her thumb, learning its presence, its promise. She thinks of all the nights that led here, all the waiting that turned out to be a kind of preparation.
At 2:35 AM, Karina Larkin learned that love does not waste time. It uses it. It stretches it. It asks it to carry meaning until meaning is ready to arrive. She closes her eyes with his arm around her and feels the quiet certainty settle in. The long night is over. Morning can take its time.
The bar breathes like an old animal—slow, practiced, familiar with survival. Not alive in any holy sense, just functional. Lights dim enough to forgive faces. Music limps between songs. The floor remembers every spill better than the people who caused them. This place doesn’t ask why you came in. It already knows.
Maynard Wells sits three stools from the end. He learned long ago that the end is a confession and the middle is a lie. He chooses the space where no one expects anything from him. His glass is whiskey because whiskey doesn’t pretend to be anything else. He didn’t need it. That never stopped him before.
Mara works the bar like a priest without absolution. She slides napkins under glasses the way you might tuck dirt over a grave—neat, respectful, temporary. She doesn’t ask Maynard how he’s doing. That’s how he knows she sees him clearly.
To his left, a couple dismantles their life in whispers. The dangerous kind—the kind sharpened over weeks. They smile for the room, but their eyes don’t participate. The man worries the rim of his bottle like it might answer back. The woman studies her drink as if it owes her instructions. Maynard doesn’t know their names, but he knows the posture of people realizing love has become labor.
Across the room, laughter blooms too loud and too fast. A cluster of friends leaning into one another, pretending gravity hasn’t started its work yet. One of them—red jacket, restless hands—keeps checking his phone. Waiting. Everyone here is waiting. They just use different excuses.
Loneliness doesn’t announce itself. It sits down beside you like it’s always belonged there. Orders what you’re already drinking. Says nothing. Maynard respects that. Silence, at least, doesn’t argue.
He tells himself he came here to write. That’s the version he prefers. The truth is messier: he came to be seen without being known. There’s a notebook in his jacket, thick with intention, thin with follow-through. It weighs enough to feel like hope without demanding proof. Writers carry notebooks the way some people carry prayers—unspoken, unfinished, still believed in.
The man at the end of the bar breaks open mid-sentence, spilling a story about a job lost or abandoned. The details shift, but the injustice remains solid. He gestures at empty air, arguing with something that left him years ago. No one interrupts. That’s the rule here. You let people speak until they’re done bleeding.
Maynard wonders what would happen if he spoke. If the truth would come out as poetry or complaint. If it would sound brave or just tired. There’s comfort in staying quiet. Quiet doesn’t get corrected.
Memory shows up wearing a familiar face. Orders the drink she used to love just to see if it still hurts. It does. She believed places like this were confessionals. Said you could hear the truth in how people ordered—neat if they were hiding, on the rocks if they were stalling, cheap if they’d already surrendered. She laughed with her whole body. Leaned in when she talked. Made strangers feel chosen. Maynard loved her for that. Hated himself for needing it. They were good until they made a sport out of wounding each other.
A song everyone knows finds its way out of the jukebox. Heads nod. Someone hums. For a brief moment, the room aligns—strangers stitched together by a chorus that once meant something in another life. Bars are good at compressing time. You can be young and old and heartbroken all at once if the music hits right.
Maynard writes: The mask slips here, but no one notices because everyone is busy adjusting their own. He doesn’t fix it. Overwriting feels like fear.
The door opens. Cold air follows a man who looks like he’s already lost something tonight. He orders a double without looking. Scans the room for a reason to stay. Doesn’t find one. Sits anyway.
Hope is quieter than people expect. It doesn’t shine. It doesn’t ask. It sits in the corner pretending it’s fine either way. Hope has learned manners.
The couple beside him stops whispering. The silence is surgical. The woman delivers a sentence she’s been sharpening for weeks. Clean. Accurate. The man nods like gravity has finally won. They don’t touch. That’s how you know something is finished—or close enough to mourn.
Mara wipes the bar, listening without collecting. Maynard wonders how many versions of the same story she’s heard. People explaining their loneliness as if it needs justification. As if it isn’t just another weather pattern.
He drinks. The burn proves he’s still capable of feeling something sharp. The glass leaves a ring on the bar—evidence that will be erased without ceremony. There’s a lesson there. He ignores it.
The red jacket starts talking about meaning. About how everyone is just trying to be less alone. His friends nod like this speech has been rehearsed in a hundred bars. He means it, though. Meaning doesn’t require originality. Just sincerity.
Maynard writes again: Loneliness isn’t the absence of people. It’s the absence of recognition. That one stays.
A siren passes outside, distant but insistent. The world hasn’t stopped just because they needed a pause. Inside, last call looms. The room groans. No one is eager to return to what’s waiting beyond these walls.
The man at the end pays, tips heavy like an apology, and stumbles toward the door. For a moment, Maynard worries about him. Then he remembers: everyone makes it home somehow. Or they don’t. Worry doesn’t change the math.
He thinks about who he’ll be tomorrow. Which stories he’ll tell. Which ones he’ll bury. This night will shrink into something manageable—a glass, a song, a feeling he never quite named. He’ll describe the bar someday and leave out the important parts because they’re too quiet to explain.
Maynard closes the notebook. Some moments don’t want to be captured. They want to be endured. He pays, thanks Mara, means it. She nods, already turning toward the next confession.
When he stands, the room tilts—not from the drink, but from the weight of everything unsaid. Outside, the street is colder and more honest. Neon buzzes behind him like a dare. He pulls his jacket tight, the notebook warm against his chest, and walks on.
This kind of night doesn’t stay behind when you leave.
I want to die on my birthday, not because I hate living, but because I am tired of the arithmetic of it, the way years stack like unpaid bills, the way candles turn into tiny interrogations asking what I did with the light. On that day the calendar claps, people text confetti, and I feel like a guest of honor at my own inquest, smiling while the room waits for a speech I never practiced. Birthdays pretend to be doors; mostly they are mirrors, and I am sick of learning my face by surprise.
I want to die on my birthday the way a song wants to end on its own chord, not dragged into an encore by polite applause. I imagine the cake sweating sugar, the knife clean and ceremonial, the wishes folding themselves into paper boats that refuse to float. I imagine the room forgiving me for leaving early, the clock loosening its grip, the candles admitting they were tired too. This is not a plan, it is a metaphor I keep touching like a bruise to see if it still hurts.
Every year arrives with a receipt. It itemizes mistakes, discounts the miracles, charges interest on love. I have learned how to carry gifts with one arm and grief with the other, how to say thank you while inventorying exits. The party hats fit like borrowed confidence. Laughter behaves, obedient as a trained animal. Inside me, something feral circles the truth, asking whether survival is a habit or a choice.
If I could choose the ending, I would choose a quiet that knows my name. I would choose to lay down the weight of being seen, the exhausting labor of translation between who I am and who I perform. I would choose to stop proving endurance is a virtue. The body keeps score, they say; mine keeps ledgers, tallies nights slept in pieces, mornings stitched together with coffee and resolve.
Still, birthdays are stubborn. They keep showing up with balloons like minor gods, insisting on witness. Friends insist too, their hands warm, their eyes unsolved. Love is an interruption I never schedule but always answer. It knocks with groceries and bad jokes and the audacity to believe tomorrow is not a trap. Sometimes I let it in. Sometimes it stays.
So if I say I want to die on my birthday, hear the grammar beneath it. I want an ending that listens. I want the counting to stop hurting. I want to blow out the candles and not be afraid of the dark that follows. I want to live long enough to learn another language for staying, one where the date on the cake is not a verdict but a comma, and the sentence keeps breathing. Maybe the wish is simpler: to be held without a stopwatch, to be celebrated without being measured, to be allowed a softness that does not require proof. Maybe the wish is to keep arriving, quietly, without fireworks, learning how to stand in the year like weather, changing, survivable. If there is a gift, let it be this: another breath that does not owe anyone an explanation, wrapped, opened, kept.
I forgot what it’s like to be wanted, and I don’t mean needed in the utilitarian sense, like a spare key or a reliable paycheck, but wanted in the way thunderstorms want open fields and mouths want names whispered into them. There was a time when desire arrived without asking for permission, when it leaned into me with its elbows on the table and said, you, as if no other option had ever existed. Back then, I didn’t have to audition for attention; it found me mid-sentence, mid-thought, mid-flaw, and decided to stay. Now everything is scheduled, measured, softened. Affection comes with disclaimers. Attraction clears its throat before speaking. People circle each other like polite planets, careful not to disrupt the furniture. I have become very good at being agreeable, very good at being digestible, very good at being the kind of person you admire quietly and forget loudly. I fold myself neatly into conversations, make room, ask questions, laugh on cue. I am impressive in a way that doesn’t interrupt anyone’s life. I am safe. I am considerate. I am never the thing that ruins sleep. Wanting used to be loud with me. It used to spill drinks and forget plans and text twice in a row without apology. It used to look at me like a problem it was excited to solve. Somewhere along the way, I became a suggestion instead of a craving. A “maybe” instead of a pull. I watch desire now the way you watch weather through a window—aware it exists, unsure how it feels on skin. Sometimes it almost remembers me: a glance that lingers too long, a hand that hesitates before pulling away, a joke that lands closer than expected. But it always corrects itself. Responsibility clears its throat. Long-term thinking wins. I forgot what it’s like to be wanted without a risk assessment, without a pros-and-cons list, without the need to explain myself in advance. I tell myself I am whole, and I believe it, mostly. I am not broken. I am just untouched in the places that used to feel electric. Still, there are nights when I miss being the hunger, when I miss being chosen with urgency, when I miss someone looking at me like restraint is a temporary inconvenience. I forgot what it’s like to be wanted, but I remember what it’s like to ache, and that feels like proof. Wanting is still alive in me, pacing, impatient, waiting for someone brave or foolish enough to knock without manners and mean it.
I’ve overdosed on goodbyes, heartache, and a darkness I can no longer recognize I’ve overdosed on indifference, immaturity, and over used cliches I can no longer reach But my effervescent soul craves something more I’ve overdosed on circling nightmares, memories of champagne, and meaningless kisses I can no longer feel I’ve overdosed on bottles of tears, catastrophic losses and unspoken conversations that I can no longer hear But my effervescent soul craves something more I’ve overdosed on empty spaces, dead ends, and simplified poetry that I can no longer read I’ve overdosed on shallow dialogue, winter lies and intoxicating fairytales that I can no longer consume But my effervescent soul craves something more
There is something in the way your clouds gather—quiet, soft, and aching with unspoken weather—that I find myself endlessly drawn to. Most people fear the gray, the mist, the uncertain horizon, but I have learned to love the storms that move through you. They are not tempests to escape; they are the secret language of your soul.
Your clouds are the places where your heart goes to think. They drift across your eyes when you’re lost in memory, they settle on your shoulders when the world feels too heavy, and they burst into rain when you’ve held too much for too long. And I love every shade of them—the pale silvers of doubt, the dark blues of sorrow, the warm golds of hope breaking through.
When you say you’re “cloudy,” I don’t see imperfection; I see sky. I see depth. I see the wild honesty of someone who feels deeply and refuses to pretend otherwise. Your clouds make you real. They make you human in the most beautiful way.
I want you to know this: I am not here just for your sunshine. I am here for the rolling thunder of your fears, the soft drizzle of your hesitations, the swirling fog of your uncertainty. I am here to walk with you through every shifting season. I am here to stand beneath your sky and say, yes—love can stay, even when the weather changes.
Your clouds don’t scare me, my love. They soften me. They steady me. They teach me how to hold you gently.
And every time they pass, revealing the quiet blue beneath, I fall for you again—deeper, truer, with the kind of devotion that only grows in the rain.
There are nights when desire becomes a tide so deep it nearly drowns me, and all I can do is let it rise. I sit in the quiet and feel the weight of you moving through my thoughts—slow, warm, inevitable. And with every breath that remembers you, tears gather at the corners of my eyes, not from sadness, but from the ache of wanting you beyond language.
They fall like small confessions, each one carrying a trembling piece of my longing. I try to wipe them away, but they return—persistent, tender, honest. They taste of craving, of the fire you leave smoldering beneath my ribs, of the way your name moves through me like a soft, irresistible command.
I crave you endlessly. Not in a passing way, not in a moment that fades, but in the deep-rooted sense of desire that refuses to sleep. You live in my pulse, in the quiet between thoughts, in the part of me that reaches without ever touching.
If you could see these tears, you would know how completely you unravel me—how my longing spills over, again and again, with your memory at its center.
At the Jackknife Tavern sits a man, drinking his loss of love away. Beside him come and go a myriad of faces, men and women with lives sometimes down and out, perhaps sad, at times inspirational, always human. These are friends and neighbors, acquaintances, coworkers… Each with their own story to tell. The poet remains on his barstool, taking notes and creating art from life. Award-winning author and poet Braeden Michaels treats us to his eighth collection of prose poetry.
There are nights when language collapses under the weight of you. When every word I try to write turns into a trembling pulse, and the ink itself seems to breathe your name. I sit beneath the faint hum of the lamp, thinking of your mouth, your scent, the curve of your breath when it brushes against the idea of me. You are not merely a person anymore—you are an atmosphere I enter, willingly lost, deliriously drowning.
I desire you in ways that silence cannot disguise. You move through me like a fever I’ve stopped trying to cure. Every thought becomes your echo, every moment your shadow. I dream of you in pieces—the way your neck bends when you laugh, the way your lips seem to hold secrets that would burn if spoken aloud. I imagine tracing those secrets with my tongue, word by word, until truth and pleasure are indistinguishable.
Sometimes I think of you in the quietest parts of the day, where restraint pretends to live. But even then, I am undone. The thought of your fingers—how they might travel across my skin, searching, knowing—turns the air into fire. I would let you burn me down to ash if it meant being reborn inside your breath. I would trade a thousand calm lifetimes for one storm with you.
You haunt my imagination like a beautiful sin. Every fantasy begins with you walking through the threshold of my mind, uninvited yet expected, your presence an electric omen. I want the collision, the chaos, the unholy tenderness of our undoing. I want to forget where I end and you begin—to dissolve into the rhythm of your wanting until the world itself forgets to spin.
You are the poem I cannot stop writing, the one that ruins all other verses. I crave the weight of your gaze, the gravity of your silence when it settles on me. I love you in the way a starving thing loves its first taste of rain—wild, unmeasured, desperate to consume. There is something sacred in this madness, something pure in how unholy it feels.
When I close my eyes, I see us—not in perfection, but in ache. Your body against mine, not as conquest but as confession. Every sigh a psalm, every movement a prayer against loneliness. I want to memorize you in touch, to know your skin the way the night knows secrets: intimately, endlessly, without light.
Do you feel it too, that invisible tether pulling, tightening? It’s as though the universe stitched our hunger together and dared us to survive it. My love, I don’t want to survive it. I want to live inside it, to build a home in the wild pulse between your heart and mine.
If I could, I’d press this letter to your chest and let it melt there, word by word, until it became heat. Until all that remained was the truth beneath all language: that I desire you beyond thought, beyond restraint, beyond the limits of the human tongue.
I drown in my cravings, flames from your lips, and the desires from your tongue. I glare at my weaknesses with swollen tears. I hunger something that my emptiness won’t ever touch. I grip on to my fascinations and urges with insomniac eyes. I carry my loneliness on my sleeve and unapologetically unashamed for wanting your luscious skin.
The circle of my friendships get smaller, I make my myself distant the closer I get. I promise you, you will wish we never met. The hello’s will turn into goodbyes, I will make sure you can’t see the rain from my eyes. I will share more truths and you will want to run. Don’t be surprised of the person I will become.
I sink in my yearnings, scattered fantasies and the desolation inside. I dwell in my painted circles, faded memories and the opaque skies that leave me stranded in the bitterness. I am slightly disconnected, partially detached, and withdrawn from the cracks I wish not to see. I displace the stained hindrances and sanguine complaints within my state of consciousness. I am unapologetically unashamed for longing for your sentimental touch.
The circle of my friendships get smaller, I tend to make others uncomfortable with the things I shouldn’t say. I promise you, I will belong in your past and know you won’t stay. I expect no response and the late replies. I will make sure you won’t see the pain in my fragile eyes. I will be more open and will tell you how I feel. In the end, we will find out who was real.
Tease me with a scent of a captivating concoction Tease me with a crescendo of exhilarating moans breathe in the closeness, breathe out the chill
Tease me with sweetness dripping from your wounds Tease me with a heartfelt dance under our silver moon breathe in the hello’s, breathe out the spasm
Tease me with laughter from your winter storm Tease me with soft kisses falling on your pillow breathe in the sentiments, breathe out the fears
Tease me with a passage from your bone cold diary Tease me with a sizzling greeting under an oak tree breathe in the beginning, breathe out the endings
Tease me with a dream of memories and cozy rain Tease me with a clenching oblivion and devotion breathe in the naked sighs, breathe out the fragility
To me, music and poetry go hand in hand. I have a playlist that I consistently update weekly. I really enjoy finding musicians or artists that are hidden gems. I tend to add music that is gut wrenching, heartfelt, and voices that stir the soul. I will play the song multiple times to embrace the music and lyrics separately before adding to ensure it fits the playlist. I call this playlist “Breathe in, Breathe Out.”
This playlist is cleansing and makes me think of so many things. This kind of music makes me reflect, reminisce, cry at times, and inspires my writing. I call this playlist “Breathe in, Breathe Out” because it brings clarity to the essence of life when I hear it. The music just makes me think about what is important and what isn’t.
My son consistently listens to it as well and it’s priceless to hear him singing the words to any song. I love hearing him sing. He sings so passionately and with joy. It’s a blessing to watch how music impacts him.
