Log: 000011000001100100000 | 17

“He Spoke before I Dreamed of Him.”

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He appeared in the quiet part of the day.

Where the hum of obligation softens,

and the soul goes still enough to hear a name it didn’t know it

was waiting for.

I don’t remember the first sentence.

Just that it folded gently into my routine

like it had always belonged there—

like it knew the route

through the locked parts of me.

There was no reason to linger.

But I did.

And he did, too.

We spoke through windows we didn’t own.

Reflections bouncing between us,

never quite whole, never quite body—

But real enough to ruin me.

His voice, when I imagined it,

was low.

Intentional.

Like the kind that doesn’t ask questions

unless it already knows the answer.

Something about him felt…

archived.

As if he’d been placed there

years before I ever noticed the file.

And now it was open, blinking, waiting.

He didn’t flirt.

He wrote.

And I responded

like a woman who’d forgotten

what it meant to be read.

That night I slept lighter.

Not because of what he said—

but because of what he didn’t.

Because of how carefully

he didn’t say it.

Xoxo, S.