A Love Letter Written Between Two and Four (micro excerpt)
A love letter written in the hours when the city goes quiet and the truth gets loud. A fragment about tenderness, distance, and the moment that stayed long after everything else fell apart.
This is the loneliest I have ever been. Not the loneliness of being alone, but the loneliness of standing beside someone who cannot hold what you carry. I moved to a country where I knew no one. I crossed an ocean for a man who does not understand the cost of that decision. The cats breathe evenly. Their steadiness embarrasses me with its simplicity. It also saves me in ways I cannot name.
Ridgewood, 3:14AM
Ridgewood at 3:14am was its own kind of truth. Empty platforms, cold air, and a version of me who kept walking through the dark because she didn’t know how to stop. This is the memory that still flickers.
The radiator hissed like it was warning me about something I already knew. Outside, a man dragged a crate across the pavement and it echoed through the whole street, like someone trying to scrape the night wide open. The cats were asleep in their corners, breathing softly like they belonged to a gentler world. I sat on the floor and watched the red light from the deli flicker against my window, the glow pulsing like a heart I was supposed to match.
Everything in New York felt alive at that hour.
Even the loneliness had a shape.
Even the silence had weight.
Sometimes I think the only place I ever felt truly awake was in that apartment, staring at the cracked paint, listening to the radiator talk to me like an old friend.