The Geometry of a Lingering Breath

The water doesn't just touch my skin; it remembers what I’ve forgotten. Here, in the blue-black silence of the pool, the city’s roar dissolves into a hum that vibrates against my ribs like a secret heartbeat. Every droplet clinging to my collarbone is a pixel in a memory we haven't lived yet—a map of places we might go if we only dared to let the surface break.
I close my eyes and see his face, not as it is now, but as it becomes when I think of him: blurred at the edges, softened by the steam of our shared nights. He told me once that healing isn’t a destination, just a series of breaths taken in sync with another person's rhythm. My hair drifts around me like ink in glass, tracing patterns of longing against the dark. The pink silk against my chest feels like his hand—warm, persistent, a constant anchor in this liquid void.
In this space, time is fluid. The past is a ripple; the future is a current pulling me toward him with an invisible gravity. I don't need to reach out to know he is there. To be here, with my heart beating against the water’s weight and his name forming in the bubbles of my breath, is enough. We are two ghosts learning how to breathe together in the deep, suspended between what was and what might never end.

Editor: The Unfinished