I Held Out My Hands And He Gave Me The Sun.

i learned how to pray by saying his name into my pillow, like a secret god who never answered but still, i whispered. still, i believed. he never touched me, but i flinched when he laughed because it felt like lightning — like something holy, like something that could leave marks without ever getting close.

he had the kind of face that made poems sit up in my chest, like dogs trained to beg. and oh, i begged. for him to look at me. to say my name like he meant it. to hand me just one finger so i could build a religion around it.

love was never a choice, only a fever that didn't break. and i called it beautiful. and i called it his. and i called it mine, until it swallowed my voice and left nothing but longing scraped raw on the inside of my mouth.

he is a myth now. a first draft of god. and maybe that's what devotion is — not worship, but the wanting. the waiting. the wound you don't stop touching just to make sure it still hurts.

i said i loved him, but i meant i was starving. meant i hadn't been full since the first time he smiled like the sun had chosen me. (it hadn't. it never did.)

i wanted to be soft, but some loves only sharpen your bones. i kept trying to eat what i wasn't given. chewed on glances, bit the air where his name had been. scraped my tongue raw on all the things i didn't say. (how loud does silence have to scream before it tastes like something real?)

he was never mine, but i carried him in my mouth like a secret i didn't know how to spit out. sometimes, i think he still lives between my molars — a ghost with a grin and blood on his hands.

love isn't always red but it's always hungry. and god, i was.

it's strange, how the touch you never got can leave fingerprints on your soul. sometimes, in the quiet, i feel his fingers on my skin, though i know they never were there, never held me the way i wanted, the way i needed.

but hands — they are greedy things. they want to take everything and still feel empty. i think of all the times i reached out, only to pull back, because there was nothing to hold. just air, just the space between my skin and his.

but still, my hands remember. they curl into fists at night, clawing at the ghosts of warmth, scraping at the memory of where his hand should have been. i never got to touch him, never got to hold him the way i wanted to. and yet, i carry the shape of his hand in my chest, like a wound that never heals, but somehow, never closes.

maybe that's how it is — you love someone, and they leave you empty, but in a way that fills you up, until you can't remember what it's like to be whole. you just remember how to ache.