The Saltwater Silence Between Us

I spent three years in the city learning how to be a ghost, drifting through glass skyscrapers and sterile meetings until my heart felt like an old photograph left too long in the sun. Then you found me—or perhaps I let myself be found.
Standing here now, the water is cold enough to sting, yet your gaze burns through me with a quiet intensity that makes the ocean feel small. I wrap my arms around myself not because of the breeze, but because if I don't hold onto something, I might simply dissolve into this blue expanse under the weight of everything we haven't said.
The white lace of my bikini feels like a fragile promise against skin that has forgotten how to be touched without hesitation. You are standing just out of reach, your silence more demanding than any word spoken in those crowded city streets. I can see it in your eyes—the same crushing ache for something real, the same desperate need to stop pretending we aren't breaking inside.
I step forward, my toes sinking into the shimmering sand, letting a single ripple brush against us both. In this suspended moment of salt and light, the walls I built from concrete and habit finally collapse. It is an explosion in slow motion; a tidal wave of suppressed longing that threatens to pull me under.
I don't want your pity or your poetry. I only want you to look at me—really look at me—until there is nothing left but the raw, shivering truth of who we are.

Editor: Deep Sea