I never knew when it started, really.

Maybe it was the way you never flinched when I got too close, even when the silence between us curled like smoke in the air. Or how your gaze held mine—not with hunger, but with something more fatal. Familiarity. Like you'd been watching me long before I noticed you.

I remember the rain that night. Manila’s skies swallowing the moon, your wrist brushing mine on the rooftop, neither of us moving away. You laughed at something I didn’t quite hear, so I nodded like I understood. Truth is, I was too distracted. You were speaking in glances then, in shifts of breath and the way you lingered just long enough to leave me undone.

I started writing songs I could never perform, poems folded behind mirrors, verses etched on my ribs. They were all you.

Passion? It was never loud. It seeped into the quiet gestures—coffee cups passed hand to hand, jackets offered without words, bruises healed in silence. You and I—burning slowly, like fire trapped in wet wood.

One night, you touched my face with the back of your hand—your thumb at my cheekbone like a dare. I didn’t kiss you. Not yet. It would’ve broken the spell. I just stood there, drowning in the look you gave me. That was more intimate than anything physical.

And now, even when we part, even when days stretch into aching hours, I carry the echo of you—in every lyric I write, in every shadow I walk through.

You were never mine all at once. But you’ve always been everywhere in me.