What We Do Not Say in the Open Street

 

What We Do Not Say in the Open Street
The hour is late, the city wired tight
with sodium glare and the low hum
of what passes for safety.
We walk two arm’s-lengths apart
because the old laws still breathe here,
because habit is a heavier coat
than either of us chose to wear tonight.Your glance cuts sideways, quick as a thrown knife—
not accusation, only recognition.
I feel it lodge under the breastbone
where the pulse stutters and steadies itself
against confession.
We have learned this grammar:
the unsaid syllable that hangs between mouth and mouth,
the way your fingers flex once
then fold back into the pocket
as though touching would burn the air
public.I remember the room where no one watches,
where your skin under lamplight is dappled
like river-rock after rain—
scarred a little, still warm, still possible.
There the body speaks plain sentences:
here, and here, and do not stop.
But out here the sentence fractures.
We become translators of our own hunger,
carrying it home in silence
like contraband fruit
smuggled past the border of other people’s eyes.What would it mean
to walk shoulder to shoulder,
to let the hand find the hand
without flinching at the shadow of judgment?
Not freedom yet—only the beginning
of not lying to the pavement,
not lying to the wind that carries sound. Yet we go on walking
this measured distance,
two women carrying the same charged current,
repressed like groundwater under concrete,
pressurized, patient,
waiting for the crack
that will let it rise,
rush,
flood the street
with what we have always known
and never yet been allowed to name aloud.Even now, in the half-dark between streetlamps,
I feel your desire mirror mine—
not loud, not safe,
but steady as the river working its patient way
through stone.
We do not touch.
We do not need to.
The repression itself has become
a form of touch—
painful, intimate,
mutual.