Unnamed Poem

I remember the eyes first—
weather-colored, shifting like the sky deciding
whether to break open or clear.
Eyes that didn’t look at me,
but through me,
past me,
into the places I kept barricaded.

He moved like someone raised on exits,
always mapping the room,
always measuring the distance
between danger and the door.
I knew that rhythm.
I lived in it too.
Two people built from the same kind of vigilance,
the kind you don’t choose,
the kind carved into you long before adulthood.

He smelled like winter mornings,
wood smoke clinging to his clothes,
neroli on his skin,
fresh-cut lumber in his hair.
Even when the alcohol on his breath
could have knocked a buzzard off a shit wagon,
there was still something warm beneath it—
something human,
something trying.

I remember the shower most.
The way he washed my hair
like it was a fragile thing,
like I was a fragile thing.
The way he held my face
as if he were memorizing it,
thumbs resting just under my jaw,
eyes shifting colors
like he was seeing every version of me at once.

I didn’t know then
that memory could become a ghost,
that a moment could follow you
through seventeen years,
through other hands,
other rooms,
other storms.

And now he’s back—
or the idea of him is—
and my heart is split between
the part that wants to leap
and the part that remembers
what happens when someone feels familiar
in the wrong ways.

I don’t know what to do with that.
So I write it down,
nameless,
timeless,
like a page torn from a journal
I never meant anyone to read.