It happened without warning.
Sound thinned.
Even silence seemed to pause
the moment a stranger spoke to me
as if we had already met somewhere else.
We arrived through another voice,
a borrowed bridge,
and stood awkwardly on opposite ends of a sentence.
She feared my tone before she knew my words,
thought I might raise my voice
just because she appeared unannounced.
But she stayed.
There was a gentleness to her presence—
the kind that doesn't ask permission,
only offers space.
I was never someone who continued conversations.
I knew how to end them well.
Yet with her, endings forgot their purpose.
Something hollow in me
began to echo less.
I spoke of unreal things—
ghosts that wander without knowing why,
stories that exist only because someone believes in them.
She listened.
Not politely—
curiously.
So I brought her fragments each day:
thoughts, questions, half-formed wonders.
She kept them all.
Closeness arrived quietly,
disguised as familiarity.
Friendship pretended to be enough
until it wasn't.
Voices crossed paths with the people who made me,
and somewhere in that crossing
my balance shifted.
She asked once—
carefully—
how I saw her.
I chose the safest answer.
Words shaped like distance:
family, familiarity, harmless affection.
She smiled,
already knowing the lie.
Space was attempted.
Distance rehearsed.
Neither survived.
What she felt was not hunger,
not possession—
something softer,
more dangerous.
An empathy that stayed
even when it should have left.
And when silence finally demanded honesty,
I gave it a name
without explaining it.
Some confessions do not solve anything.
They only change the gravity
between two people.