reading room
Beneath Permanent Shelter
A year is a strangely human way to measure absence.
The trees outside my window have already forgotten which leaves belonged to last spring.
But today marks exactly three hundred and sixty-five days since I last sat beside you without needing to explain myself.
And I wake some mornings with the shape of you left in me like an indentation in fabric.
Not love — at least not the kind the world keeps trying to sell us.
Something quieter. Something harder to name without sounding naïve.
Now, my days are cleaner. That is the first truth.
I eat before I am shaking. Sleep before the room turns blue. Write before the feeling hardens. Think without needing witness.
My room no longer smells of stale afternoons rotting slowly into midnight.
I have learned how to sit alone without immediately reaching for another voice to fill the weather inside me.
Sometimes I walk for hours through cold streets with music in my headphones
and feel almost unbearable gratitude for my own mind.
A year ago I could not do that.
A year ago I was living almost entirely beneath shelter.
You were a harbour I mistook for the sea.
And I stayed anchored there so long I forgot currents existed.
We built our friendship like children building dens inside the roots of enormous trees —
safe beneath the dark, warm with breath and laughter, certain the storm could never touch us.
And maybe it couldn’t.
But nothing grows beneath permanent shelter.
There are whole forests that only open after fire.
I think of us then —
the shared mattress on my floor, the strange ease of our bodies, how neither of us flinched from skin or softness.
The way you hugged me without calculation.
How I could exist beside you without arranging myself into someone legible.
Because that is what most days are:
arranging.
The measured voice. The careful hands. Every gesture edited through the static ache of living inside a body that feels partly mistranslated.
People exhaust me the way bright supermarkets do —
too much light, too much noise, too much awareness of being seen.
But with you I could forget my outline.
I could be unfinished aloud.
Maybe that was the danger:
not you, not us,
but how easy it was to mistake warmth for weather.
I miss that warmth, with a grief that arrives softly,
like fog crossing fields rather than storms.
But I cannot pretend we were saving each other.
You were drifting outward already.
Toward girlfriends, toward rooms I was not meant to follow you into.
And I —
terrified of becoming real —
held tighter to what was easy.
You became the room where I never had to meet the person I might become alone.
Ivy climbed quietly there.
By the time I noticed, it knew the walls better than I did.
I do not blame you for wanting more life than our little orbit allowed.
Sometimes I wonder if I made you smaller too.
If we both mistook closeness for completion.
The world teaches boys to abandon tenderness the moment it risks being mistaken for need.
It teaches all of us that intimacy only matters when romance sanctifies it,
as though two people cannot hold each other together briefly and beautifully without eventually being asked what they are becoming.
Maybe we broke partly beneath that pressure.
Or maybe we simply reached the natural edge of who we were to each other.
Some rivers run beside one another for miles through valleys
before quietly dividing around separate hills.
Neither river is wrong for continuing.
Today,
one year later,
I stood in the kitchen unable to decide what to do with my hands.
And for a moment I missed the simplicity of existing beside you more than anything else I have ever known.
But I opened the window.
And outside,
the wind moved freely through branches no longer bent into shelter.
It sounded lonely.
It sounded alive.
— Lilith