She Who Walks My Sleep

She comes without footsteps,

slips through the unlocked doors of my sleep,

a hush moving through corridors

I never meant to build.

I do not know her—

and yet she knows me well enough

to leave fingerprints on my thoughts

and vanish before morning can testify.

Is she born of imagination,

or a relic of something older—

a passing breath of Aphrodite,

or the quiet trespass of Venus

wandering where memory thins?

She appears as she pleases,

uninvited and unforgettable,

a choice I never make

yet must live with.

When she lingers, I unravel.

When she stays away too long,

I ache for the ache itself.

Her face is clarity without detail,

a voice softer than confession,

a touch that convinces me

the body remembers things

the mind refuses to name.

Moon-pale skin,

porcelain fragile as belief.

Hair falling like a waterfall

that never reaches the ground.

Eyes—

no, light pretending to be eyes.

Sometimes she is a girl crowned in flowers,

sometimes a figure framed by booklight and dust,

sometimes a whisper stitched into music

or a prayer folded into silence.

Sometimes she writes—

ink bleeding from her fingers

as stories rise like winter breath.

Sometimes she trembles,

caught in an anxious sea

where survival feels like a dare.

I ask the darkness who she is.

It answers only with her return.

And in my waking hours,

I wonder—

do I haunt her too?

Does my shadow wander her halls,

a nameless shape she almost recognizes?

Does she wake with the same question

burning behind her eyes?

Perhaps we are only echoes,

passing each other in sleep,

close enough to feel,

too distant to claim.

So I wait.

Not for answers—

but for the night to open again,

for her to cross the threshold once more,

and remind me how beautifully

unresolved longing can be.