I keep hearing it at night,
that hum under the skin,
that cricket-chirp nobody else notices—
the sound of love the way the mystics meant it.
Not the kind that says you are mine,
not the kind that builds fences,
but the kind that burns the fences down
and then hands you a bouquet of ashes
like it’s the only honest gift left in this world.
Osho said love is not a bargain.
Rumi said, close your eyes. Fall in love. Stay there.
And I think about what that means
when the world keeps teaching us to hold,
to brand, to chain.
But love—real love—is a thief.
It steals you from you
and me from me
and then dances with the empty spaces like a drunk Sufi spinning in the desert,
laughing because the whole joke is
there was never a you,
never a me,
only the music,
and the dance,
and the breath between words.
I imagine us there,
where language goes to die.
Where even the word love feels heavy,
like carrying water in iron buckets
when the river is right in front of you,
moving, endless, spilling over itself
just to feel what falling feels like.
You can’t own the river.
You can only drown in it.
You can only strip naked in the dark
and walk in like you’ve been waiting for this your whole life,
like you knew all along
that this is what God meant
when He said come home.
And if you listen closely—
not to me, not to the world,
but to that small singing in the silence—
you’ll hear the crickets.
They’ve known it forever.
That love isn’t two candles burning side by side;
it’s one flame devouring two wicks
until even the smoke
has nowhere to go
but everywhere.