Author: notafaggot
Between us, the green keeps its silence.
The hills swallow your name the way peat swallows rain,
holding it somewhere I cannot reach.
I follow every crooked path toward you,
yet each one folds back into itself,
vanishing beneath bracken and shadow.
You are there.
I know it by the things that find their way to me—
the silver hush of mist caught between the pines,
the fern-heavy dark beneath the trees,
the last amber light clinging to the edge of a field.
Fragments of a place that seems to breathe with you in it.
And I am stranded on the far side of some ancient forgetting.
The forest knows this ache.
It grows fat on it.
Some nights I pour fire down my throat
just to feel something travel the distance between us.
The bottle offers its small, false miracles—
for a moment I can almost hear the streams moving over stone,
almost feel the damp earth beneath me,
almost believe that if I follow the scent of rain and moss long enough
I will find you waiting somewhere beneath the canopy.
But dawn is merciless.
It leaves me with an empty glass
and the same uncrossable paths.
The fields are still wrapped in emerald.
Summer refuses to die properly.
Everything lingers:
the green,
the rain,
the longing.
Especially the longing.
Not only for you,
but for the world that holds you.
To walk where the roots break through black soil.
To disappear into the folds of the hills beside you.
To stand beneath the dark boughs and feel the forest close around us
like something ancient recognizing its own.
Instead, I gather what drifts across the distance:
a glimpse of heather bending in the wind,
water dark as old iron,
the hush that settles over the trees before evening.
I hold these things too tightly.
As though wanting them hard enough
might place me there with you.
Sometimes I think of us as two standing stones,
half-buried in distant hills,
enduring the same weather.
The same moonlight finds us.
The same storms bend around us.
Yet neither can move.
Neither can close the space.
So I sink deeper instead—
into smoke,
into spirits,
into anything that softens the sharp edge of your absence.
The earth takes it all without judgment.
Beneath root and moss,
beneath the black water and sleeping peat,
my desperation seeps downward,
searching for you through the dark.
And somewhere below the green weight of the world,
where no roads exist and no promises survive,
I imagine it finds your own—
two sorrows meeting in the soil,
while above them
you wander through the forest I ache for,
and I ache for both.
Nice, I guess