The Room Between Us
A note before the poem ‘The Room Between Us’
Following on from my post on the poem Awakenings, I am excited to present a second poem, from a collection I am putting together, called A Study in Almost.
I hope you enjoy.
I have found that there are moments in emotional life that exist almost entirely in implication.
Nothing decisive happens. Nothing is declared. No boundary is visibly crossed. And yet everyone involved understands that something has shifted beyond retrieval.
This poem was written many years after the events that produced it, but the emotional atmosphere remained remarkably intact in memory: the strange intensity of reunion after absence, the awareness of restraint operating in real time. The way conversation can continue perfectly normally while another conversation, the real one, unfolds silently beneath it.
What interested me, in writing it, was not consummation but suspension.
The moment before action.
The held breath.
The mutually recognised thing that cannot safely be named and therefore becomes present in every gesture instead.
In younger work I often wrote toward intensity directly. As I have aged, I have become increasingly interested in proximity: in the emotional charge carried by what does not happen, by what remains deliberately incomplete.
That, perhaps, is part of what A Study in Almost gradually became about.
Not simply desire, but the architecture of restraint.
The poem that follows lives in that narrow and dangerous space between recognition and surrender. The space where two people understand far more than they are willing to say aloud, and where the silence between them becomes its own form of language.
The Room Between Us
Eyes move before thought,
tracing the room
as though searching were accidental,
as though this were chance.
But it is not chance.
It is pattern.
Habit.
A quiet, practiced orbit
that brings us, inevitably,
to this.
That moment.
Where your gaze finds mine.
And holds.
Not long:
never long enough
to be remarked upon,
to be named.
Just enough
to alter the air.
We move toward one another
as though nothing has changed.
A smile, easy, familiar, rehearsed.
An embrace offered
in the language of courtesy.
And accepted.
But something lingers in it.
A fraction too long,
a warmth that does not belong
to politeness alone.
Hands meet.
Fingers touch,
withdraw,
then return,
as though reconsidering
what they already know.
Sliding:
from shoulder
to the curve of your back,
resting,
lingering,
at your hip.
A boundary crossed
so lightly
it almost feels imagined.
“How are you?”
The words arrive
as they must:
small talk laid carefully
over something far less manageable.
“Well enough.”
A pause.
“Better, for seeing you.”
It is all we say.
It is not what we mean.
Because beneath it,
beneath the ease, the rhythm, the surface,
something burns.
A quiet, contained fire
fed by absence,
by restraint,
by everything not done.
Thought falters.
Fragments scatter.
The room recedes
to little more than shape and sound,
while we remain.
Fixed
in the gravity of each other’s presence.
Too long.
It has been too long.
Not a day,
not truly,
passes untouched by you.
The admission does not leave the lips.
It does not need to.
It lives instead
in the way we stand too close,
in the way neither of us
quite steps back.
In the way your eyes
search mine
as though asking a question
you already know
I cannot safely answer.
My love…
The word forms,
unspoken,
dangerous.
I want to draw you closer.
To close what little distance remains
and pretend, just for a moment,
that the world beyond this room
has no claim on us.
To feel the truth of you.
Not in glances,
not in fragments,
but fully,
without interruption,
without consequence.
But even here,
even now,
we do not move.
Because this,
this suspended, fragile thing,
is all we are permitted.
So we remain
on the edge of it.
Hands still touching.
Breath still shared.
The space between us
no longer empty,
but not yet crossed.
And in that space
everything lives:
What we are.
What we want.
What we will not allow ourselves
to become.