It began like recognition—
When I witnessed you for the first time.
Flesh and blood, alive but on edge.
It started with a hum under my ribs,
something ancient stirring.

Our eyes collided like two strange constellations—
I saw myself reflected within you;
Reverent, ruinous.
As if the soul had found a twin,
if memory had worn flesh.

You were captivating,
peculiar in the same wrong ways I was,
and your presence made the unseen parts of me bloom.

It felt inevitable,
like the fever inside of me had been waiting for your pulse to quicken it.
We moved through each other
as if memory came before touch,
as if we had already died together, hand in hand, in some other life.

I could always feel you,
a presence coiled around my spine,
watching me in silent reverence,
as if every flutter of my heart
were a prayer only you could hear.

We drank from each other as if it were ceremony,
blood warm and living between our teeth—
a communion of the deranged,
proof that we existed,
that something inside us still pulsed.

Now, you linger—
half in the room, half in some other world,
spilling “I love you” like thin blood
from a wound that no longer aches.

Your words scrape like blades across my skin,
hollow echoes of the fever we once shared.
I reach for you through this crypt of absence,
but all that reaches back is shadow.
The warmth we drank has already gone cold.

Between us crawl only primroses,
pale as ghosts, nodding over graves of laughter we buried too soon.
Heartache drips from the ceiling like black wax,
and every drop goes cold and solid before it hits the floor.


I think this is how it ends—
Quietly.
Like silence choking on its own echo,
your presence shrinking in the dark.

You bleed out of me slow,
my languid sickness,
and I drink what’s left—
stale blood, iron grief,
the ghost of sweetness rotting on my tongue.


My heart trembles beneath the knife of us.
I swallow the silence we carved,
the hollow fire that lingers inside,
and taste nothing but the marrow of memory, tender and strange.

---

𝑎𝑛𝑔𝑒𝑙𝑚𝑎𝑟𝑟𝑜𝑤

Pretty words for ugly things.

• Buried Correspondence
• Poetry
• Stories

---