Three Days Ahead...
Beekeeper,
Your smile lingers, something between a dare and a promise. I'll keep your invitation tucked away, untouched for now, until the moment feels earned. Still, I find myself rehearsing questions I haven't asked, certain they'll confirm what I already suspect: that there's something unexplainable about you, something just shy of magic.
I tell myself not to watch too closely, not to trace your movements like they mean something. I fail at that, consistently. I live in the fragments you've already given, the soft blur of sweetness and smoke, the quiet confession disguised as casual conversation. You let me see more than you meant to. Not everything, but enough to recognize the shape of it. Enough to know you wanted someone to desperately understand how you came to become this way.
You don't owe me time. I know the distance between where I stand and where you let people in. Still, there's a quiet, unreasonable part of me that wants to matter there, to be something you can't dismiss so easily. You love a puzzle as much as I do, but next time, don't pocket the final pieces. I would have stayed longer to finish it with you.
You occupy my thoughts in ways that feel both misplaced and inevitable. I keep circling back to that open-ended invitation—“ask me anything” and wondering what you were really offering. Curiosity? Control? A test? Or something riskier than all three. Let's swing around in the hammock, reminiscing about times when this all seemed plausible.
It took me longer than it should have to recognize your beauty. Not because it isn't obvious, but because it arrives quietly, carried in the calm you create without trying. It disarms more than it impresses. And that's rarer than you think.
There's a restraint in me where you're concerned, a deliberate distance I maintain, not out of disinterest, but because I'm not entirely convinced this stays innocent if I let it collapse. And I suspect you already know that.
There's something familiar in you. Not comfortable, something deeper than that. Like recognition without context. As if we've met somewhere intangible, somewhere that doesn't translate cleanly into language. I won't try to explain it. I don't think I could, even if I wanted to.
Tell me about the parts of you that don't resolve neatly. Not because I think I can fix them, but because I understand what it is to carry something unfinished. We don't need solutions for that. Just recognition.
Your smile doesn't quite conceal what lives underneath it. There's a quiet loneliness there, one you wear well enough that most people probably miss it. I don't. Tell me again about your mother. I imagine her kind. I imagine her knowing you in ways no one else does. I imagine she's waiting, in her own way, for you to come back to yourself.