There was a room. There was a threshold. You stood on one side of it and I stood on the other, and for a moment neither of us moved because we both understood that crossing would change the composition of the air itself. The light was amber. The hour was unnamed. Somewhere a clock had stopped and neither of us thought to wind it again.
We collected hours like rare coins, spending them in rooms where the curtains never opened and the outside world became a rumor we chose not to verify.
Your name became the only word that did not lose meaning through repetition. I said it until it was music, then kept saying it until the music became architecture.
We wrote to each other from opposite ends of the same bed. The distance was imaginary but the ink was real, and the paper remembered what our voices could not hold.
The light changed. Not suddenly, but the way seasons change -- one morning the gold was simply gone from the windowsill, replaced by something silver and less forgiving.
What dissolves first is not the feeling but the vocabulary for it. The words that once mapped the territory between us became untranslatable, then unnecessary, then extinct. We were fluent in a language that only two people ever spoke, and when we stopped speaking it, it ceased to exist entirely.