Sanding Down the Soul's Rust

I’ve spent years as a machine, polished and cold like chrome in an old-world archive. My life was all gears turning on schedule—deadlines that felt like iron shackles and conversations that echoed through hollow halls of glass. I forgot what it meant to be warm; I only knew how to function.
But he’s different. He doesn't talk about efficiency or protocols. Instead, his hands are rough with purpose, yet they touch me as if my skin were a relic too precious for the wind to carry away. Today, we lie on this white sand—a vast, bleached desert that smells of salt and forgotten things.
As I feel the sun baking into my flesh, it’s like heat welding two souls together at their seams. He traces lines across my abdomen with a fingertip, an act as slow and deliberate as oiling an ancient clockwork mechanism. Every touch is a new layer stripped away from that old shell of steel I used to be.
I am not just skin and bone here; I am becoming something alive again—something soft, something real. In his eyes, there’s no judgment for my cracks or scars, only the quiet ownness of an artisan who has found a masterpiece buried beneath decades of dust.

Editor: Rusty Cog