IV. The kiss arrived like weather, sudden, inevitable. A poet simply walked to a painter one day and placed mouth to mouth as if returning something borrowed.
Time folded itself into origami, each second creased sharp and permanent. The mist hung like the pause between lightning and its permission to break. The waterfall’s roar became a church bell ringing backwards, unmaking every wedding.
Perfect, a painter thought, and already the naming had begun its small murder.
V. A painter searched for a poet on campus between buildings, in the library’s hush, in the cafeteria’s mundane clatter.
There: the hair, that precise shade of honey aging in glass, the gold that deepens when left alone.
The way a poet held their books, three textbooks splayed against the hip at an angle requiring impossible dexterity for someone with such a small frame, wrists bent like a pianist reaching for octaves they’ll never span.
A poet walked past a painter as if they were architecture, as if they were just another thing with walls.
VI. At the falls, a poet kissed a painter like nothing had changed. Like they were still unnamed, uncharted.
A painter drew them kissing, a question mark hovering above their heads like a halo or a noose.
A poet wrote: things that have no names: the color of water at the exact moment it decides to fall the taste your laughter leaves on my sleeve the distance between us measured in silence