What a Man Means

Love, he says, sounds like a door closing softly in a room he built for your name— that deliberate click of the latch catching on possibility, the way silence expands after the last word has been spoken. Watch him afterward: how he becomes a man translating himself into a language he's never learned, his phone glowing at 3 AM with your name typed, erased into the void of messages he'll never send, afraid your silence might answer first. This is the archaeology of want: how he maps the geography of your smallest gestures, the way you rest your coffee cup against your lip before speaking, memorizes the coordinates of every place you've ever touched his skin. And perhaps this is why when astronomers speak of dark matter— that invisible weight holding galaxies together— I think of him learning to love the way gravity loves: silently, essentially, without asking permission from the stars, the way heat travels through empty space to warm what it has never touched.