as an escape

in another universe, the air does not chill or burn. it lingers - warm as the last sip of coffee forgotten beside a love letter, left untouched, but still breathing.

distance is a lie we never learn to speak. there, we do not wander down wrong roads searching for something that was never ours to lose. right and wrong are not cages passed down - they bloom from our blood like instinct, strange and unchallenged.

in that world, we are not strangers clawing through wreckage to find one another. we are children. friends. perhaps lovers.

we chase the sun barefoot through the meadows that never knew fences. we climb trees fat with green mangoes and childhood, laughing until our lungs give out - as if joy were some secrets we were born already knowing. 

we live on the same street. we leave our doors open. we touch without flinching. and truth - sweet, guileless truth - falls from our mouths like fruit too ripe to hold.

there, love is simple. it is not a battlefield or a bargaining chip. it does not arrive scarred or late. it takes two - only two - to build a home.

in that universe, we are not born from pain. we are not held together by the shape of our scars. we are forged from stillness, from peace, from mornings that do not begin with dread.

there are no curses to lift. no trauma to unlearn. no nightmares coiled beneath the bed.

only paradise. a soft place where no one raises their voice. a meadow for the untouched. a sky that does not fall. a home - a real one. not a place we run to, but a place that waits for us to return and never once asks where we've been.