A Universe of Love

The way you fold your coffee cup between both palms on winter mornings— I memorize this quiet ritual as if it were scripture. Your thumb traces circles on the ceramic rim, steam curling like your hair after rain. In that suspended moment before speech, I taste the salt of almost-losing you. Last Tuesday, when you laughed at my terrible joke about quantum physics, your shoulders shook like earthquake aftershocks, and I swear the kitchen tiles shifted beneath us. You stare at the scar above your left eyebrow— that childhood accident you never speak of. My lips find that small, stubborn silence, kiss it into something like forgiveness. Your breathing changes when you sleep, becomes the tick of our bedside clock counting moments I refuse to waste on anything but this: your pulse against my wrist. I lie awake memorizing these rhythms, knowing morning will steal the particular way you say my name when you're still half-dreaming. The space between your fingers when you reach for mine across the breakfast table— sunlight pooling on white porcelain— measures exactly the width of everything I cannot say: how your laugh makes coffee cups tremble on their saucers, how your absence turns doorways into rooms I cannot enter. —Stop. Before the day forgets how softly it began. In the ordinary Tuesday light, you butter toast and hum off-key— and the kitchen holds its breath, like dawn learning how to rise.