Where The Walls Still Breathe

Cold ice crunches beneath the heels of my red vintage boots — the ones I found at that thrift store on Stuyvesant Avenue. My fingers turn purple, not from the polar vortex, but from your grasp. Condensation curls between our red faces as we wait in line outside the warehouse, its cracked brick facade daring us to go in.

The heat from hundreds of bodies swallows us as we cross the splintered threshold. The space breathes honey and wood smoke, held together by a sagging black curtain strung across an old clothesline. The whiskey burns down my throat, softening the raw edges of my voice, the way my mother’s pink bathrobe.

You caught my wrist and turned me —the rough cracked leather of your jacket brushing my arm, your breath wet against the cold that had just left my body, the air splitting open like fabric torn too fast.
“Stay.”
The word hit low, under my ribs,
a vibration that swallowed the music,
that made every dancer, every light, every sound fall away.
It was gravity and warmth and danger all at once—
the kind of word that lives on skin long after it’s said.

I’d been waiting five years to hear that one word — stay —
ever since that humid night on Bird Road.

The backyard glowed under a string of half-dead bulbs,
the grass soft and slick, my heels aerating the soil with every unsteady shift.
Beer clung to the air, mixed with sweat and something metallic —
summer heat, cheap perfume, the pulse of the drums still thudding through the walls.

I sensed you before I saw you.
A shift in the air, a gravity pulling at my spine.
Then the door creaked open,
and there you were — breathless, skin shining through your drenched white t-shirt,
the rhythm still chasing you out into the night.

When your eyes found mine, the sound inside cut out —
no bass, no chatter, no laughter, just the hush of recognition.
It didn’t feel like meeting.
It felt like remembering —
as if our souls had already known the script
and were simply stepping back into their lines.

From that night on, I carried that word —
stay — like a pulse under my ribs,
waiting for you to say it out loud.

I was ready to say yes. 

I wanted to —
so badly the silence between us began to shake.
The yes hovered there, fragile and burning,
a small, wild animal I couldn’t set free.

But I had just gotten my independence back.
It still felt new, unsteady — like walking barefoot on ice.
My dream job waited for me, sharp and gleaming,
a doorway I’d spent years trying to reach.
And yet, standing there with you,
freedom felt like a language I suddenly didn’t want to speak.

A life with you flickered behind my eyes —
the chipped baby-blue kitchen door slamming behind small feet,
our mugs drying in the sink,
tiny hands waving goodbye in front of P.S. 3,
the school I still whisper sometimes,
like a prayer still hanging in the air between us. 

The word came out steady — too steady —
like I’d rehearsed it in another life.
I told myself I needed to prove I could stand on my own,
that this wasn’t just the ghost of my divorce wearing your face.

You didn’t move.
Your embered eyes searched mine for a crack in the armor —
You caught it then, that brief shimmer of the woman who almost said yes,
and I saw the confusion flash across your face,
the way hope still fought to live in your chest.

The air between us tightened,
vibrating with everything we weren’t saying.
It felt alive — humming, pulsing —
a current running through two bodies standing too close.
Every breath deepened it,
until even the walls seemed to lean in, waiting.

And then it stilled.
The heat drained.
The music bled back in.
And I understood — too late —
that the sound I was hearing wasn’t silence.
It was the sound of me breaking us. 

Our dreams flew away into the snowlit sky,
and the part that hurts most is knowing it was my hand — only mine —
that let them go.
I was the murderer holding the knife,
the wound still warm in your back.

If an angel appeared tonight, offering to return me to any moment —
not the marriage that broke my arm,
not my sisters before they chose their endings —
I’d go here.

I’d come back to this warehouse,
its walls beating like a heart,
to the silence trembling between us,
to the breath I never released.

Your freckles would be small maps I finally dared to follow,
your brown hair falling across your forehead
the way dusk spills over the Barclays Center.
I’d reach for you —
and my reflection, blonde hair tangled, emerald eyes unguarded,
wouldn’t flinch this time.

Some nights I swear I can feel her —
the woman who stayed —
breathing just beneath the surface of this life,
holding our curly-haired children on the train to Montauk.

Both lives live inside me now —
one salted with loss,
one golden with everything I’ll never touch.

And when the whiskey burns my throat,
I still can’t tell which world I’m drinking from.

<3 M.