He holds my poems in his hands like artifacts, delicate yet distant, as if the words might crumble beneath his fingertips. He says he wants to read them, but when I tell him there is more—so much more—he does not ask to hear it. He does not ask to see the words still trembling within me.

I want to unfold the letters I have hidden, to show him the ink that dared to be braver than I ever was. My notebooks know the weight of my heart better than I do; they are homes for confessions I have never spoken aloud. But he does not speak the language of fear. He is a conqueror of uncertainty, always moving forward, never looking back.

He is a paramedic, a witness to wounds that are always red. He understands blood in its simplest form—a thing that spills, a thing that stains, a thing to be stitched shut. But what of mine? He does not know that I bleed ink. He does not see the way my veins pour black onto pages, how my emotions rise in charcoal lines and whisper through the strokes of graffiti. My scars do not weep crimson; they stain in words, and I wonder if he will ever understand that some wounds are written, not seen.

Perhaps he will never know. Perhaps he was never meant to. 😔

©️ Beatriz Esmer