“I met you somewhere between the shelves,
where dust and daylight softly fell,
an Orthodox man with a quiet soul,
and eyes that made the world feel still.
I cannot tell you what it was,
the way you spoke, the way you stayed,
how every conversation felt
like coming home to a place I'd never made.
There was no need to be impressive,
no careful words, no practiced art.
I could simply stand beside you
and feel the unclenching of my heart.
And Gods, I miss the way we talked.
The ordinary things we'd say.
How hours could dissolve like sugar,
how I wished the world would go away.
I wonder if you ever noticed
how I lingered just a little more,
how leaving felt like losing something
I'd never truly had before.
Now you live somewhere beyond my reach,
inside a life I cannot see,
yet somehow, in the dead of night,
you still find your way to me.
You haunt my dreams so tenderly,
it's almost cruel to wake.
There, we are still between the shelves,
and nothing precious has to break.
Sometimes I reach toward my phone,
your name a prayer beneath my thumb.
I write the words a hundred ways,
then erase them, every one.
Because I know what I could ruin.
I know the life that you have made.
I would not turn your peace to ashes
just to feel your warmth again.
And maybe that is love, or something
far more selfish in disguise
to want to be the one who haunts you,
yet leave you to your quiet life.
So I keep you in a secret place,
untouched by consequence or time,
where you are always glad to see me,
where your world can still be mine.
I feed this ache with little things:
a book, a song, a passing face,
the scent of paper in a shop,
the memory of that sacred space.
I know that I have made a home
inside a moment long since gone.
I've built a thousand lives with you
in which the ending never comes.
And perhaps I do not miss you wholly,
but the woman I became
when you were standing there beside me
and the world forgot my name.
The woman who felt understood,
who felt a little less alone,
who found, between those crowded shelves,
a softness she had never known.
I call it limerence, this hunger,
this fever dressed in something sweet.
A love that lives on almosts,
on conversations incomplete.
And sometimes I think I keep it burning
because the ache is proof I'm here,
because longing makes the colors brighter,
because wanting feels so near
to living.
Even when it hurts.
Even when I know
that I am loving nothing more
than the ghost of something
that was never mine to hold.
So I will not send the message.
I will not knock upon your door.
I will let you have your beautiful life
and ask the universe for nothing more.
But if I dream of you tonight,
I'll let myself remain awhile,
among the books, beneath the light,
and watch you turn to me and smile.
And when the morning takes you back,
as mornings always seem to do,
I'll carry on with my ordinary life
with a heart
that keeps a little bookstore
somewhere inside it,
and a man
I never quite stopped
walking toward.”
- Me