Between Sand and Shadow

I arrived in a land of warm winds,

thinking a change. of sky

might quiet the ache inside my chest.

But the first nights were heavy,

a storm of faces, bodies, hunger.

A world speaking a language

I did not yet know how to hear.

Eyes slid past me like waves,

then circled back like tides.

Desire flashed and vanished,

as if I were both visible

and unseen.

My heart asked,

Who am I here?

My body answered with silence.

I wandered through heat and noise,

feeling the old wound stir,

the fear of not being chosen,

the fear of vanishing in a crowd

that never stops moving.

But something in me refused to run.

I let the ache crest and break.

I felt its salt.

I stayed.

And in the staying,

a door opened.

I learned the secret steps of this place,

the slow glance,

the held breath,

the way shadows bend toward heat.

A stranger’s mouth became an echo

of something I thought I had lost.

Hands found mine in the dark,

and for a moment

I remembered my own fire.

But desire, when taken too fast,

is like drinking from a flame,

it warms the lips

and burns the throat.

After the seventh kiss,

the thrill dissolved

and a deeper hunger rose.

Not for bodies,

but for truth.

So I walked toward the dunes,

those shifting mountains of silence

and let them teach me.

There, the wind carved me open

without wounding me.

There, I remembered

I am not small.

I am not lost.

I do not need a crowd

to confirm my existence.

In the hush of sand and sky,

a gentler light found me

the kind that does not demand,

does not flee,

does not try to prove anything.

Later, in a quiet room

with warm hands and steady breath,

I tasted a different kind of fire:

one that did not burn,

one that held.

A softness fierce enough

to meet my own.

A meeting of equals,

body against body,

shadow against shadow,

light learning the shape of light.

And something in me exhaled.

Not because I was chosen,

but because I finally chose myself.

I realized then:

every man I met was a mirror:

one for longing,

one for fear,

one for hope,

one for desire.

Each a small teacher

sent by the same unseen hand

to guide me back

to the place I had forgotten.

the place where I belong to myself

before belonging to anyone else.

Now, as I stand between sand and shadow,

I do not chase,

I do not hide,

I do not beg for echoes.

I open.

And in that opening

I know:

Love will find me

not because I seek it,

but because I have finally become

a home it can enter.