Spine

The sound arrives before understanding— a small crack, the pages shifting like a breath held too long, released.

There is nothing between us now: ink-dark characters swimming into focus, margins breathing white space, the weight of all those unread hours lifting from the binding.

Each page turns with the whisper of something being born, the smell of paper and possibility, that first humidity where my fingers have already begun to mark the text.

I am breaking something open only to find it was waiting, patient as dust on a shelf, for this exact moment of intrusion.