Still Bloom

The Princess and the Poet

Threshold

We recognise alteration—

a difference in timing,

a gesture requiring more care,

the quiet awareness

that closeness is being held

more deliberately.


Nothing announces itself.

Yet attention deepens—

sharpened, unspoken,

a weight I carry

even before I name it.


We remain beside one another

with greater precision,

as though time itself

has become the element

we move within—

thinner, colder,

holding less than it once did.

Your hand
rests on my wrist—
pale skin,
soft unchanged,
yet I feel the contact
before the movement completes,
as though the moment
has prepared itself
ahead of time—
waiting,
as if it knows
it will not come again.

I notice
the metal of your rings
no longer sits tight.
There is space now
between the gold
and the bone—
a slight give
that was not there before,
a gap nothing is able to fill.

And here is the thing I will learn to name too late:
When I almost speak, my throat closes of its own accord.
When I almost reach, my arm grows heavy as stone.
The choice not to ask, not to press, not to break the quiet—
it is not a decision I make with my mind alone.
It settles in the space between my ribs,
a physical chill that holds me still,
as if my own body has agreed to let you go
before I even understand what is being agreed to.

We sit,
and the space
between our shoulders
disappears—
not by closing,
but because
nothing remains there
to hold apart—
as if the distance
has already been folded
into something final.

You lift the cup.
Your fingers gather
with their usual ease,
the motion complete,
yet held
a fraction longer
at its height—
as if you are memorising
the shape of the action,
or testing what strength
remains.

When you laugh
toward the sky,
I watch the small passage:
breath rising,
the neck following
just after—
the order preserved,
yet gently retimed,
like a song slowing
to its last few notes.

Nothing altered in form.
Everything recognisable.
Yet the rhythm
in which things arrive
begins, softly,
to slow—
and I let it.

When you speak,
your voice settles
closer to where it begins,
remaining
as though the air itself
has chosen
to hold it—
to keep it safe,
to keep it from fading
too fast.

I do not question it.
I notice instead
how often your gaze
pauses just beyond the room,
attending
to something
kept quietly within reach—
something I could have asked to see,
something I chose not to.

© 2026 L. O. Campbell
All rights reserved.

✧The Princess and the Poet continues…

End Note

Love here is the decision

not to reach for what is held back —

a choice I will turn over

a thousand times in the dark,

feeling still the weight

of my own arm that would not move,

the chill in my throat that would not speak.

It is the recognition

that some things must be carried

in privacy —

even when that privacy

becomes the space

between what was

and what could have been.

We honour the inward turn

by allowing it to be —

and I will carry that allowance

like a stone in my chest,

heavy and unshakable,

for the rest of my days.