#Prism With a Hairline Fracture

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twin junco
#

It is not that I do not want to trust you.

It is that light has behaved badly before.

Once, I was clear glass—
not naïve, just open.
I let brightness enter without interrogation.
I did not measure its temperature.
I did not ask how long it planned to stay.

Then came the leaving.

Not all at once.
Not a dramatic shattering.
Just a series of small abandonments—
footsteps retreating down hallways,
messages thinning into silence,
hands loosening their grammar around mine.

Each one left something almost invisible.
A filament.
A stress line.
A tremor inside the architecture.

lunar coyoteBOT
twin junco
#

Now when someone stands close,
when their voice lowers into that intimate register
that suggests permanence,

my body tilts.

Not away—
never obviously away—
but just enough to test the angle of impact.

Because I know what refraction can do.

Light does not break a prism.
It reveals its fractures.

And I have learned
that the moment before love settles
is the most dangerous brightness of all.

You say you are not leaving.

My chest hears footsteps anyway.

You say stay.

Somewhere in me, a corridor
fills with the echo of doors
I have already watched close.

It is impossible to explain
how quickly the past migrates forward—
how a simple delay in your reply
can split into a spectrum of old departures.

You become briefly indistinguishable
from everyone who ever turned away.

This is the cruelty of abandonment:
it does not remain historical.
It refracts.

The present enters,
and suddenly I am lit
by every previous absence at once.

I want to trust you.

I want to stand in your light
without calculating escape routes.

But there is a hairline fracture
running through the center of me—
so fine it cannot be seen
unless the sun hits at the wrong angle.

When you pull back—even slightly—
it glows.

And I am no longer here with you.
I am back in every room
where love proved conditional.

Still—

I am trying.

Each time you reach for me
and do not disappear,
the glass warms.

Each time you stay through my flinch,
the angle softens.

Trust, for someone like me,
is not a leap.

It is the slow decision
to let light pass through again
knowing it may expose
every hidden weakness.

It is standing very still
when the brightness arrives—
and refusing to run
at the first flicker.

I am not unbreakable.

I am refracting.

And if you are patient enough
to remain in the room
while my past flashes through me—

you may find
that even fractured glass
can make something astonishing
out of light.