A Life We Borrowed

In another life we'd learn the map of mornings —

trace the soft geography of each other's faces,
spend whole summers inventing reasons to stay.
You are the spell that makes the margin burn with ink;
you are the small, impossible gravity
that drags me out of safe sentences and into risk.

Golden-brown mornings, coffee-stained and slow,
your name folded into every ordinary thing —
a curtain that trembles, a streetlamp that remembers.
I used to write of love like it lived in museums,
polished and distant; you taught me it could be messy,
mud on our shoes, laughter in the sink, a song on repeat.

We would not waste a single moment finding each other:
no late trains, no missed doors, no apologies boxed in paper.
We would speak in whole truths and soft rebellions,
learn each other's silences like secret languages,
practice returning — again and again — until it became home.

For now I keep you in the pages I refuse to burn,
a halo of light on the corner of a page: golden, persistent.
If not this life, then the next — but even in this one,
I am learning to both write about love and to live it,
one small, incandescent day at a time.

by Onnaya