Never Love Nor Lust But an Addiction

 It was never love. It was addiction.

The way she felt beneath my hands, the way silence wrapped around us like a secret we were too afraid to speak. I traced invisible maps on her skin, my fingers searching, claiming, memorizing every inch of her like a traveler afraid of losing his way. My lips pressed against her neck, my eyes closed—because seeing her was never the point. It was the feeling. The sound of her breath, ragged and needy, the weight of her presence in those fleeting moments when nothing else existed but skin and heat and the poetry of pleasure.

I was never in love with her. Just addicted to the way she touched me, the way her hands found my body like she’d done it a thousand times before, the way her scent lingered long after she was gone. It wasn’t lust either. No, it was something else—something I still can’t explain, something that sane men don’t talk about.

And God, I miss her. But she was never really there, was she? Just a ghost, a whisper of what could have been if life had played out differently. If I’d met her another way—if we had locked eyes across a room and skipped the pointless small talk, skipped the charade of first dates and polite lies meant to make us seem more desirable. If she had just stayed, just once, for more than a night.

I wish we could have skipped the noise—the fights over nothing, the petty frustrations, the questions that drive people apart. I wish we could have just loved each other, even on the days we didn’t like each other. Because that’s the love I want—the kind that sneaks up on you, that burrows into your bones before you even realize it’s there. The kind you deny at first, even though you fell the moment you saw her. The kind that doesn’t need validation from the world, because it simply is.

And maybe, if the world had been kinder, if time had been on our side, I would have pulled back the veil one day, and we would have danced on our wedding night, laughing at how it all started.

But a ghost story is just that—a ghost story. And ghosts don’t stay.