Echos of Insight

We’d split from the noise—“I’ll meet you at the car”—
and I stepped out the restroom door, still half in motion.
His silhouette caught my eye;
he felt it, turned, and our gazes locked.
Recognition hit clean as breath, and without a word
we moved together through a different door,
the one that opened toward the night.

As if the night were listening, we stepped into the same breath.
Mouth to mouth, unguarded—
a moment that changes gravity.
For a beat everything held:
air, skin, pulse, the unspoken yes.
The whole world bent inward—
streetlight trembling on wet gravel,
the hush before thunder that never came,
the faint hum of a car still idling somewhere past the hedges.

When it broke, the darkness stayed soft, inviting,
as if the universe wanted us to go on
and I was the one who ended it.

He drew me in once more—arms around me,
his cheek resting against my crown—
and then I backed away,
my fingers traveling the length of his arm
until only his fingertips answered mine.

I turned and jogged toward the waiting headlights.
He watched—or maybe waited—
his outline steady against the night.
Inside, warmth and laughter. I smiled too fast.
Joy beat against my ribs like a caged bird.
I pressed it down before the air could shimmer.

Hours later, steam and silence returned the world to itself.

A song I hadn’t chosen poured from the speaker—his song—
beginning in apology, ending in ache.
A voice low enough to reach the bones
moved across my damp skin like memory rediscovering its body.

He used to listen like me—
head tilted toward the ceiling,
as if the message lived higher than the noise
and you had to raise yourself just to hear it.
He would sit inside the lyric until it trembled,
until the emotion behind it broke open,
letting the ache have its own oxygen
until the song quieted on its own.

Steam blurred the mirror into mercy.
Somewhere in the fog my throat began to hum,
low and steady, as if the sound had always been mine to keep.

And there, beneath the running water, I caught myself mouthing the words—
while I was busy waging wars on myself,
you were trying to stop the fight—
and I laughed softly, realizing the lyric still fit,
only now I see it turned toward me instead of away.

I stood there, wrapped in the residue of song,
understanding that all this time
I’d been fighting the quiet that was never against me.
He had been the cease-fire,
my silence the truce.
I was never withholding.
I was tuning.

After the water, the house began to wake.

Morning light pooled across the kitchen floor
in slow forgiving strokes.
He was somewhere in the house—
barefoot, half-buttoned, unguarded—
singing to the dog, to the day,
each note bright and reckless.

I sat still, letting the sound find me.
For years I mistook this stillness for distance—
thought silence meant absence,
thought my quiet was the space between us
instead of the resonance beneath.

Now I hear it for what it is:
the body’s agreement with peace,
the way water listens to the moon,
the way silence completes the chord.

He hums; I breathe.
Different instruments, same field.
And when he glances over,
the air between us steadies—
chosen, involuntary,
the same.