The Language of Skin

There is a dialect spoken only in the dark— not because it's shameful but because some conversations require closing your eyes to hear properly. Your hand on the small of my back is a complete sentence. My breath against your neck is a paragraph I could never write in daylight. We have spent years learning each other's grammar— where to pause, where to press, where the body says yes without the mouth saying anything. This is not the love they sell in movies— the choreographed collision of beautiful strangers. This is Tuesday. This is knowing exactly where you keep your tension and spending twenty minutes unlocking it with my thumbs. Desire, they say, fades with time. They're wrong. It just gets more specific. Less volcano, more river— steady, warm, knowing exactly where to go. Afterward we lie in the ruins of the bed and talk about nothing important— groceries, the dog, whether the neighbors can hear us (they can, we don't care). This is intimacy: not the act but the ordinary conversation after— two bodies returning to their names, their separateness, their quiet gratitude for the bridge they built and crossed and will build again.