A glass rectangle vibrates against the wood.
Midnight.
A sudden, violent flare of blue in a pitch-black room.
A digital ghost, sliding a paper pamphlet under an iron door.
I look at the glowing letters on the glass.
He brings me a link. A suggestion. A blueprint for a neatly folded life.
A quiet, contained, predictable cage, handed casually to a woman who drinks mortar and breathes steel.
He wants me employed. Tethered. Small.
I have told him, until my throat bled, that I am the architect.
But a man terrified of heights will always beg you to climb down from the scaffolding.
Swipe.
Delete.
The screen goes black.
It should feel like an execution. Clean and bloodless.
It should feel like severing a dead limb and walking away light.
But the biology of memory does not respond to a touchscreen.
My mind knows he is a shallow well.
But my tongue is coated in dust, and my skin is begging for the rain.
Bare feet slapping cold linoleum.
One.
Two.
Three.
I am pacing the kitchen at a godforsaken hour.
The harsh, fluorescent hum of the refrigerator paints my legs.
I am tearing through cupboards, hunting for sugar, for salt, for a thick, heavy carb to swallow so my chest will stop caving in.
I turn on the television, praying the synthetic colors and the loud, artificial dialogue of strangers will drown out this sudden, violent skin-hunger.
It doesn’t work.
Nothing drowns out the physical gravity of an open palm.
The phantom weight of breath on the back of my neck.
The smell of cotton and heat.
I am a sovereign who breathes easiest in the vastness of her own territory.
And yet.
Tonight, the moat feels too wide.
Tonight, the isolation is a physical bruising.
I miss a man who thinks the clock is an eraser.
He thinks time is a silent laundering machine that will wash away the unpaid invoices of the heart.
The literal gold he left on the table. The heavy questions he buried in the dirt.
He operates on the cowardly physics of evasion—hoping that if he stays perfectly still in the dark, his debts will simply expire.
And here is the terrible, agonizing grace.
Here is the duality I must hold in both hands without breaking my own wrists.
He is a creature horrified by the anchor.
He is allergic to the heavy, rhythmic drumbeat of consistency.
Because a woman who knows the exact, uncompromising shape of her own power is a blinding mirror to a man who does not know his own face.
He loved me with the only fragmented tools he had in his pockets.
He passed down the only shallow affection he was ever taught to hold.
He did his best.
AND his best left me starving.
Both are true.
His hands were empty, and I am still allowed to weep because I wanted them to be full.
I shut the refrigerator door.
The kitchen goes black again.
I am begging the universe for a soft place to land.
The romantic yearning sits in my jaw like a swallowed coin, tasting of metal and grief.
I want the romance. I want the safety of a shared silence.
But I will not lower the drawbridge for a phantom.
I will not trade the sprawling, terrifying beauty of my empire for a desk he found on the internet.
I walk back to the mattress.
I pull the heavy linen over my bare shoulders, lying in the vast, empty center of the bed.
I am lonely.
I am shivering.
But I am no longer running a halfway house.
Tomorrow, the sun rises.
Tomorrow, the iron holds.
