Touching Me

The anatomy of a distance that never healed

You once said the skin remembers more than the mind
And I laughed, not because I disagreed
But because I knew it was true in ways I could never confess
Long after the night ended
After the rain washed the windows clean
After the sheets cooled and the mirrors fogged over
My body kept circling you like a slow orbit
Around a planet that refused to show daylight

There are places on my chest
That never learned to close
Not because you wounded them
But because you opened them too carefully
Gentleness is its own kind of damage
It makes departure unbearable
It makes absence feel authored
It makes a goodbye sound like a negotiation

I never knew how to talk about intimacy
Without turning it into investigation
Measuring the temperature of your silence
Tracking the pulse in your wrist
Counting the seconds between your breaths
To see if I still existed inside them
You made anatomy emotional
You made longing scientific

Some nights the city hums in my ribs
And I swear I can feel your hands
Aligning bone and sorrow
With that slow precision, you never apologized for
You traced me like a map you were afraid to finish
As if closing the route would make the journey real

I keep thinking touch ends when the hands leave
But touch lingers longer than language
It stains timelines, contaminates memory
Turns every future body into comparison material
I hate you for that
I thank you for that
Contradiction sits comfortably between my shoulder blades
Where you once rested your thoughts

There are hours I can't account for
Moments lost between headlights and crosswalks
When something invisible brushes against me
With just enough weight to feel intentional
Sometimes I think it's you
Sometimes I know it's just the past
Relapsing

I learned it's possible to miss someone
Without liking who you were with them
I learned pain can be slow
Like an instrument warming up before the performance
We were always performing
Even naked, even whispering
Trying to sound like people who knew
What they were doing
We didn't
We were improvising with borrowed oxygen

To this day, when I shave
I pause at my collarbone
Because that's where you paused
Every single time
As if there were something sacred hidden there
That only you were allowed to touch
I don't believe in gods
But I believe in rituals
And you became one by accident

You're not here anymore
But I still adjust my breathing
To the rhythm you left behind
Goodbyes don't erase touch
They archive it
Some archives we never learn to close