Lipstick on an Unsent Letter

I write you in the shade the mirror saves for after-hours—

The color stores call cherry, the kind my mouth calls courage.

The page is a small white room.

I enter, leaving the door unlatched.

≻──

Every sentence breathes on its own like a window plant

I’m not sure I deserve to keep.

The ink doesn’t stumble; I do—

looping around the places that bruise when named.

≻──

I test the shade against the edge of the envelope,

a soft-red crescent moon, proof that I was here—

like pressing a seal into warm wax,

except the wax is my face,

And the seal is a kiss I can’t survive sending.

≻──

Some loves are postage: weight, destination, a queue.

Some are river: no address, only current.

Ours learned to be glass—

perfect at keeping water and light apart,

Impeccable at showing me myself.

≻──

The letter asks for the old arguments like a bedtime story.

I give it silence.

Instead, I tell it about the lemon tree that refused to fruit

until I stopped asking.

About the busker who tuned his guitar to the traffic

and played anyway.

≻──

Inside the fold, a sentence I will not mail:

I loved you like a city loves a blackout—

only when everything else went dark

Did I understand the shape of my own rooms?

≻──

The mouth-print cools to a quiet verdict.

No stamp. No street.

I slide the envelope into a drawer that keeps moths and other soft endings.

Let the red crescent fade to something less theatrical and more true.

≻──

Because the lipstick was never a promise to deliver—

only a compass for a trembling mouth, pointing home.