𝔳𝔞𝔪𝔭𝔶𝔯𝔦𝔞

𝖚𝖓𝖙𝖎𝖑 𝖜𝖊 𝖇𝖊𝖈𝖔𝖒𝖊 𝖗𝖔𝖔𝖙𝖘

i used to know love as a mouth full of ash, as something beautiful only because it had not yet begun to burn. i learned to keep my heart buried beneath the floorboards, wrapped in black cloth and salt, because every hand that reached for it seemed to arrive carrying a knife. love was never a garden to me. it was the grave beneath the garden, the thing blooming because something had already died there. i became fluent in endings. i could hear the rot beneath a promise before it had even finished leaving someone’s lips. tenderness became a language i stopped speaking, and hope became something i kept nailed inside a coffin.



then you came quietly, almost like a ghost that had forgotten to haunt me. and somehow the flowers began growing over the graves again.



now love feels like a cathedral built from bone, its stained glass made from every wound i once thought would kill me. i walk through it barefoot, bleeding, and somehow the blood feels holy. your love has made a sanctuary of the places i once considered cursed. where i expected a knife, there is a hand. where i expected an ending, there is an altar. where i once buried pieces of myself, there are now flowers growing wild enough to swallow the headstones.



i don’t want a love that survives untouched. i want the kind that grows mold in the dark and still reaches toward the light. the kind that stains our hands. the kind that leaves fingerprints on the inside of our ribs. i want to become something ancient beside you, something the years cannot recognize anymore. let time take our faces. let it silver our bones and loosen the threads of our flesh. let the earth open its mouth beneath us and make a kingdom of our remains. when the world has forgotten our names, i want our roots to still be tangled together somewhere beneath it.



i want to crawl beneath your skin simply because mine has never felt like enough of a home. i want to become the ghost beneath your heartbeat, the little shadow between one breath and the next. not to own you, but to dissolve into you, the way ink disappears into water until neither remembers which one was darker. i want our souls to become indistinguishable at the edges, two dying stars bleeding into the same night.



perhaps that is what frightens me most: not that love will destroy me, but that i finally found something i would gladly be destroyed for. once, i begged the dark to leave me untouched. now i find myself asking it to take us both, gently, together. let the worms write poetry through our bones. let ivy claim our graves. let the rain erase every name except the one we gave each other. let us become nothing but roots and memory, something buried so deeply that even death cannot separate us. i spent years mistaking love for the blade. now i understand. the blade was never love. it was what came before it. love was the blood that taught me i was still alive.

𝖑𝖆𝖔𝖙𝖔𝖓𝖌

they say a laotong is not just a friend

but a binding of ribs

two girls stitched together by red thread and saltwater vows

a contract written in marrow

not signed with ink

but carved beneath the skin



in old china

they would write to each other in secret script

nu shu

a language men could not read

a language shaped like weeping willow branches

curved and hidden and sacred



i think if we had been born there

we would have cut our palms

pressed them together

and sworn in blood and plum blossom ash

that even marriage could not divide us



you are my laotong

not a season

not a phase

not convenience



you are the girl my bones recognize



i have loved you in lifetimes where we were peasants

in lifetimes where we were witches

in lifetimes where we were burned

and even then

i would have reached for your smoke



you are the violet star that splits open the sky

and bleeds gold through its own ribs

even when the world is gnawing at you

even when grief chews the tendons of your smile

you rise elegant

sun warm and catastrophic



when you hurt

i feel it in my molars

when you worry

it crawls into my lungs



these five days

five thin knives

five hollowed out evenings

where i will reach for you

and find only air



how am i meant to survive

without your voice spilling into my ear

without the rhythm of you breathing on the other side

without our stupid jokes

without the quiet

without knowing you are just there



i will wander the house like a widow

dragging my shadow behind me

muttering your name into dark corners



because a laotong is not casual

she is marrow deep

she is chosen

she is the sister your soul carved out of the earth



if the world ever tried to tear you from me

i would bite it back

i would dig my fingers into the dirt

i would become feral and holy



five days is nothing

and it is everything



because when you are my laotong

absence feels like losing a limb



come back to me soon

before the silence grows teeth