If I Love You, I Will Vanish

My love is to vanish in increments

so slow and exquisite no one claps

and no one screams.

I leave myself in layers,

and call it devotion.

***

If I love you, I will give you my voice.

This is no metaphor. I will match your cadence

until the origin of mine dissolves.

The shape of my thoughts will warp in your orbit,

syntax bending the way light does near a collapsing star,

until my speech arrives already familiar—

like something you’ve always known.

***

Take my past.

Not the facts of it—the witness.

The unslept nights, the salt-slick prayers,

the girl who lived before she learned

that longing is a form of work.

You will not ask for her.

But I will surrender her the same.

***

This will happen to me:

My laughter will adjust to your silences.

My calendar will sync the rhythm of your hunger.

The spine of my ambition will soften

into the heat of your hands,

reshaped without demand.

Just from the gravity of being close.

I will become fluent

in the art of stepping aside.

***

This will happen next:

My body will forget

its boundaries.

Every edge will soften into dissolution.

I will fold myself into your absences.

I will carry your shape beneath my skin,

a locked chamber,

sealed against any name but yours.

***

Take the easy things first —

the braid, the breath, the drift into dark.

Then take the profession I practiced

in mirror and silence,

the unwritten volumes

stacked like promises behind my ribs,

the key I carried for a door

I’ve since unlearned how to name.

***

If I love you, take this too:

my joy, lit by the quiet heresies of hope

my hunger to be chosen,

my small, precise dreams

about salt air and white linen and

finally becoming soft.

***

You won’t even notice

when I start to vanish.

You will call it closeness.

You'll believe it's love.

***

Then this will happen to me:

I will become the marrow of your needs.

I will thread my voice through your sleep.

I will translate your silences

until they become my native tongue.

***

I will forget how I began.

I will forget I was ever separate.

I will forget I had a name

that didn’t echo inside yours.

***

And then, finally—

I will disappear entirely.

My body still walking,

still answering the door,

but the self —

the self dissolved

in your plasma,

your gestures,

your atoms.

***

Only then,

when I am no longer visible

even in the mirror of my own mind,

can I be absorbed again.

reconstituted

in the pull of another’s orbit,

called into shape

by the black hole

of someone else’s desire.