No Common Language Yet

 

No Common Language Yet
We wake in this rented room above the avenue
where trucks grind gears at dawn and the newsstand opens
with its metallic clatter. Your arm across my ribs
is heavy, familiar, the way rain settles on the sill
after a night of storm. I trace the faint scar
on your shoulder—old, pale, a story you never tell fully—
and think how love arrives not as lightning
but as these small, repeated acts: your breath steadying
against my neck, the coffee we brew in silence,
the way we move together through the city's indifferent pulse.No one has imagined us here,
two women claiming this ordinary hour,
the light slanting through blinds striped with dust,
our bodies still warm from sleep and touch.
We are not young; the years have carved their lines
around our eyes, our mouths. Yet in this light
your skin glows like river water at dusk,
and I want to say: this is enough—
this quiet defiance, this refusal to vanish
into the script written for someone else.But the world presses in—
the radio murmuring headlines of wars we cannot stop,
the neighbor's door slamming like a judgment.
We are not free; we carry the weight
of what has been denied us, the silences
we learned early. Still, I reach for you
across the sheet, fingers finding yours,
and feel the pull—not gravity, but something fiercer:
the need to live openly, to name this
without apology, to let our love
be as public as the street below.We will go out soon,
walk the cracked sidewalk past the bodega,
buy bread and oranges, speak low
about what comes next.
No promises beyond this morning,
but in the meantime, here we are—
two women, breathing the same air,
building a common language
one glance, one touch, one stubborn day at a time.