When longing becomes pain

The body knows before language does.

That is the first betrayal.

Not love.

Recognition.

A shift so slight it could have been mistaken for weather pressure, for rain moving somewhere unseen through the dark bones of the sky.

Yet suddenly I was aware of my own hands.

How they stilled when you entered a room.

How breath became measurable.

How silence, under certain conditions, develops weight.

You never touched me enough to justify the aftermath.

That is what remains difficult to explain.

There are people who leave fingerprints.

You left adjustments.

A recalibration of distance.

A new condition under which my nervous system would agree to rest.

And then one day it was gone.

Not violently.

More like an animal slipping back into the trees after weeks of appearing at the edge of the clearing.

No snapped branch.

No warning.

Just the unbearable realization that the woods had gone still again.

Afterward, my body kept preparing for you.

That is the humiliating part.

The involuntary hope of it.

Pulse lifting at footsteps that belonged to strangers.

The instinct to turn toward certain tones of voice.

The terrible intelligence of muscle memory, continuing long after reason has closed the door.

I would sit in quiet rooms feeling the shape of interruption before it happened.

A phantom nearness.

Like descending a staircase and missing the final step your body had already accounted for.

People speak of grief as heaviness.

But this was not heavy.

It was anticipatory.

Thin. Electric.

Like standing in water waiting for thunder to choose a place.

Nothing struck.

Still, everything trembled.

Even now, there are moments when the air alters slightly and my body responds before my mind can intervene.

A tightening beneath the ribs.

A stillness gathering low in the spine.

As though some part of me remembers being almost held and cannot distinguish between memory and return.

That is what absence became.

Not emptiness.

Expectation with nowhere left to go.