You distract me —
not suddenly,
but the way heat gathers,
the way a room slowly fills with scent
until breathing itself becomes deliberate.
How can one presence
so thoroughly inhabit another,
filling every corridor of thought,
until the wanting to write
feels like pressure —
a swelling that insists
on release?
And when the ink finally comes,
it does not hesitate.
It spills —
dark and generous —
flooding the page,
uncontained,
as though the hand could no longer hold
what the body has already decided to give.
And as soon as it does,
I am nothing but
a doe in headlights —
caught,
motionless,
lit from the inside out.
I remain suspended
between two worlds.
One is cold and subterranean —
Siberia’s endless white,
Fyodor’s underground prison:
stone walls,
frozen breath,
the mind turned sharply inward
until awareness itself becomes confinement.
The other is warmth and excess —
the glow of a sultan’s tent at dusk.
Low lamplight pools across silk and skin.
Gold-threaded fabrics breathe,
heavy with perfume and heat.
Pillows yield beneath the body.
Satin clings, then slips,
warm, slow, intimate —
catching light the way skin does
when it has already been touched.
I am torn open by it.
I have been here before.
I recognize his presence —
familiar, inevitable.
He arrives in many forms,
but always with the same allure:
to come closer.
This is a beautiful suffering —
the anticipation of the divine,
so near it hums beneath the surface,
and the torment of being frozen
just at the edge of movement.
I am so saturated with feeling and thought
that I dissolve beyond the margin,
softening,
loosening,
until I am no longer contained
by the shape I began in.
Tell me —
how can you do this to me?
Or perhaps
this ache, this slow undoing,
is something I am doing to myself.
If the world is shaped by our own making,
if the way we desire another
is only a mirror turned inward —
then perhaps I am not lusting for you at all,
but for myself.
Imagine that —
to meet oneself so fully,
so nakedly,
that one could only kneel,
undone not by another’s touch,
but by one’s own recognition.
Original article: https://ladyannselene23.substack.com/p/when-the-animus-comes-home