It was a year ago—

a quiet, trembling hour—

when I knew I loved you.

No storm, no revelation,

just the soft recognition

that your name

had begun to echo in my blood.

I collided with other bodies,

a comet grazing forbidden planets.

But always—

I returned to your orbit,

not by will,

but by a force deeper than gravity.

You were the equation I couldn’t solve,

the anomaly that bent my reason,

a center of mass

in a universe where nothing stays.

Since that August,

every time I see the moon,

I smile,

knowing that from different planets,

you and I

still share the same sky.

Yet if you could measure

the space you occupy in me,

if you could trace the force

that still bends light toward your name,

you would know—

some particles collide just once,

and the universe is never the same.

Don’t call me when you’re bored.

Call me when your heart’s too full

and you need a place to let it overflow.

I’m not here to replace anyone.

I’m here for the part of you

that no one else sees—

the wild, the quiet, the inmoral, the in-between.

You have a life,

a world that waits for you.

And I?

I’m the pause.

The breath you didn’t know you were holding.

They give you the daylight,

the plans, the home.

I give you the night,

the fire, the freedom.

There’s no competition.

No pretending.

Just moments that feel like

truth wrapped in skin.

I don’t want forever.

I want the real that only we know.

And you keep coming back

because part of you lives here too—

in this space we never name.

So no,

I’m not your boyfriend.

I’m not the other.

It's fine, call me your lover.

Because lovers, in the end,

are the ones brave enough

to feel everything

and still stay,

the ones that are in love. 

Paris, 2021

I arrived with a suitcase full of silence

and dreams too big for the room I was given.

The walls closed in.

I whispered a song:

Este cuarto es muy pequeño

para las cosas que sueño.

Paris did not ask my name 

she let me unravel.

Loneliness bloomed like smoke in the corners,

but summer came

and cracked me open.

In the golden hush of unfamiliar streets,

I shed the voice that trembled,

and chose one that danced.

That’s how Valère was born 

not from joy,

but from the quiet refusal to stay small.

Now he walks freely,

carrying the boy he once was

like a scar

that no longer stings,

but still sings.