Where Color Dies, Warmth Remains

The city outside has gone grey, its neon bleeding into the glass like spilled ink. I stand in the dark of my apartment and let the single lamp carve me out of the void.
I am only a silhouette now: the long curve of an arm raised to my brow, the soft fall of hair a black waterfall against white skin. The robe hangs open at the chest, not as color but as shadow pooling in the valley between two ribs. I close my eyes and feel the warmth he left behind that evening—not his hands, which have gone back to their own grey life across town, but the heat of them still pressed into the air where he stood.
We did not speak much that night. He simply held me in the doorway, his breath a soft white against my temple, and I let the whole noisy world fall silent. In this monochrome, there is no pretense: only the truth of skin against skin, of shadow cradling light. I lift my fingers to my brow as if brushing away a tear that never fell, and smile at nothing.
Love, I have learned, is not a color. It is the quiet shape one body makes around another in the dark—warm, healing, and utterly enough.

Editor: Monochrome Ghost