What the Night Cannot Hold.. I have tried to hold your absence like water, cupping both hands beneath the weight of night, but longing slips through every tender opening, carrying fragments of you beyond my reach. Your scent in the hollow of my pillow, the remembered warmth of your bare shoulder, the way your breath once trembled against my throat.. each memory passing through the sieve of time. And still I gather what remains, as though these trembling hands could shelter the one thing they were never strong enough to keep. There are nights my body remembers you with a hunger the mind cannot reason away. I feel the ghost of your fingers along my spine, your lips pausing where my heartbeat quickens, the exquisite surrender of being known without the armour of a single word. I close my eyes, and almost feel you turn, your thigh finding mine beneath the sheets. Then darkness returns to its rightful shape, and I lie awake beside the unbearable tenderness of everything my skin refuses to forget. Perhaps love itself is a sieve mistaken for shelter. We pour our souls into another's keeping, believing tenderness can make us safe, forgetting that even the closest embrace cannot prevent the slow departures of time. Yet what strange courage the heart possesses.. to know that nothing can be held forever and still reach out with both hands open. I would rather ache with the memory of your touch than know a lifetime untouched by such tenderness. For what has passed through me has not vanished; it has left its shape in places I cannot reach. So come to me, if only in the mercy of a dream. Let me draw you close against my chest, bury my face in the warmth beneath your hair, and kiss the quiet places sorrow has not reached. I will not ask the night to promise permanence, nor beg the dawn to leave us undisturbed. Let the hours fall through us like water. Let the world take back what it must. Only stay until my trembling settles, until your breathing teaches mine its rhythm, until I understand that even a sieve can feel the whole rain passing through and lose it all, yet remain forever changed. #InkByVKrish #Foxprose