From 11:00pm until the hinge of dawn,

I was not simply awake—I was suspended,

A soul rehearsing galaxies of you,

From the precipice; I have been orbiting you 

not in words, but in the echo between words,

My chest a cathedral of unfinished sonnets.

Thoughts clung to me like constellations,

stitched and unstitched,

Poems rehearsed in secret galaxies; their syllables burning holes in my tongue,

Each verse rose, shimmered, collapsed,

Each confession burned its wings before reaching air,

So many drafts of infinity folded back into silence like stars swallowing themselves.

I lived through a thousand simulations of sonnets,

Each one nearly sent, each one collapsing into silence,

Until all became this fragile singularity,

And yet, still, you did not loosen from my mind;

You are orbit, you are axis,

You are the unnamed gravity holding me still.

4:34AM—

The hour where night is neither dying nor alive,

Where time itself seems shy to continue,

And in that threshold, all my spiraled scripts,

All my unspoken architectures of awe,

compressed into a single syllable; Hello.

I pressed the key and all the universes I carried compressed into one small offering.

Not loss of words, but words too vast to name,

Not wonder withheld, but wonder distilled,

The beyond of beyonds made small enough to send,

Not absence of language, but its overflow,

Its surrender, its astonished bow,

It is the signal flare from one universe to another,

A ciphered hymn of sleepless devotion.

It is me saying:

I have lived inside you from 11:00 to now,

through every corridor of thought,

Through every fevered echo of what if,

until even silence begged for release,

It is the word that means; I have been awake for you,

I have been inside infinite rooms of you,

I have burned every hour into your outline,

And though the night is heavy with everything unsaid,

I send you this—a shard of eternity

masked as a greeting.

So take this Hello, a fragile mask of infinity,

As if it were a temple key,

As if it were a lifetime folded into one breath,

Because at 4:34AM,

what else can eternity say

but—

Hello.

Hello.