The Ether

It begins then, in silence,

in bartered brushes of two shoulders

equally committed to a pretend game:

Pretend not 

to feel something tremble awake,  

only to hold it still,  

unspoken, quiet as breath,  

this fragile ache  

both of you pretend  

not to feel.

Pretend not

to parse meaning from

gazes that linger a beat too long,

that hang in the air like smoke,

weighty, dense with something unnamed,

a look that drifts just slightly

past the boundary of what’s easy to ignore—

yes, pretend not to notice.

Pretend not

to feel the shiver

in fingers brushing by accident,

to shrug off the warmth that lingers there,

quietly echoing, a thrum beneath skin.

Pretend not to sense

the weight that gathers

in each gentle touch, each passing glance,

building something solid in the spaces between you.

Pretend not

to measure the silence

between words left unsaid,

to disregard the way they stretch and pull,

tethering you to a feeling

you’d rather not name.

Pretend not to notice

the way your laughter fades

into something softer, something shared,

something neither of you will speak.

This is how you pretend,

in the flicker of eyes meeting then darting away,

in the way your hands hover just a breath apart,

in the silence that hums like a waiting storm,

until, perhaps, you’ll both pretend

for so long

that pretending becomes the only truth

either of you can hold.

This is how you pretend,  

in the small, unspoken places, the fragile warmth  

of shoulder against shoulder, thigh against thigh,  

a closeness that could be so much more,  

if only one of you would move,  

if only one of you would speak.

pretty rose, prettier song: