VII. The next day on campus, among the named things, Chemistry Building, Student Union, a painter found a poet by the fountain.
“Hey,” a painter said, playing along, “I think I’ve seen you at the falls.”
A poet smiled at their conspiracy. “The falls,” they said, tasting the words. “Strange how we shrink things with names. There’s this whole caldera that holds a lake like the earth is cupping water in its palms. The river drifts along until gravity catches it off guard, then it’s all white ribbons and rage. The roar that makes monasteries of the mouth.”
Their face betrayed for a moment the irony in those words.
“And hidden in the rocks, this impossible ledge where the mist writes on your skin, then erases what it wrote.”
A painter nodded, bashful, unsure how to continue this dance of pretending to be strangers when their mouths had already told each other everything.
VIII. A poet kissed a painter again the next day, longer this time, and their mind reorganized its atlas.
The place wasn’t the falls anymore, wasn’t the caldera or the lake. It was the coordinates of a poet’s mouth, the longitude of their laughter, the elevation where their silence meant more than any sound.
A painter thought: maybe unnamed things grow larger in the dark, like pupils dilating, like love before we call it love.
IX. Three days later, on campus, near the same fountain, a painter found a poet again.
“You know I really like you,” a painter said, the words tumbling like water over an edge they couldn’t see. “And I am just wondering, what is this to you? What would we even call it, you and I?”
A poet’s face closed like a book returning to its shelf, like a door remembering what it was built for.