cafe

You are tucked inside yourself, barely visible by your own design, and still I can carve you out of a crowded room, a swarming mass, a dark café. Tattered paperback cupped gently in your hands, flipping to a passage you’d read when you were 17, nursed by words your father never offered you. And you are softly sharing your seeded vacancy and here I am drenched in you, drunk off your familiar tongue, the warm rush of your thoughts mirroring my own tangled understanding, and I am licking at every word that’s ever touched your lips and you are scribbling them into hull I ache to embody. Raw longing etched into my membrane; intimate speech you’d kept tucked behind your teeth so long it felt foreign on your tongue. Chewing at pieces of my own conversation, and echoing back to you. The craving never leaves, only dulls transiently, until the next time I feel your haunting presence linger, until the next time your silhouette dissects itself its setting and hollows out my hungry eyes again.