Ritual of Restraint

1. “Modern” Romance

Law of attraction, they say.

Don’t pull too close, or they’ll drift away—

a cruel choreography of magnetic repulsions.

Don’t be the morsel, soft and stubborn,

cancerous in its devotion,

that clings to the tooth not out of want,

but out of fear of being lost.

Wedged in the gummy, crimson crevices of the mouth,

unsure whether its stay is mercy or mistake,

while careless fingers—impatient, unknowing—

tear at it with their sharpened claws,

as if love were something to be scraped off.

We talk in half-sentences, 

elliptical hearts beating beneath the blue light glow.

Every reply necessitates effort to breed effortlessness.

When did effort become such a crime?

We flirt in irony,

each joke a disguise for sincerity

we’re too afraid to show.

You type, then delete,

and I pretend I didn’t notice the pause.

We build intimacy out of fragments:

a culture of back and forths,

tides that pull without promise.

Bodies meet like shore and storm,

each touch a reminder to forget.

Yearning hums beneath the silence,

love wears the grammar of convenience,

and fleeting warmth

is lost somewhere between seen and sent.

Affection has become performance,

a rehearsed ritual of restraint,

an art form of almosts.

And still, 

we keep dancing,

carefully casual, deliberately detached.

Because perhaps, 

modern romance 

is simply two people taking turns, 

Pretending not to care.

2. “Modern” Antidote

And yet the law of attraction is outdated. 

A relic of when we thought time linear.

Love loops.

It returns with the naivety of first summers,

green and golden and endless.

We are children again,

racing the dusk, 

believing we can outrun endings.

Each heartbeat a rebellion

against the cynicism we learned too young.

Each glance a vow, wordless,

that wonder cannot be lost.

For love is not the transient blaze of beginnings

but the steadiness of staying.

It is the heartening tune that cannot be hushed

against the humdrum of daily life.

It is the unspoken rite

that ties morning to morning,

the breath you take without thinking

because someone else exhaled.

It does not demand belief.

It proves itself in small consistencies:

intertwined bodies that fold into one another,

looks and whispers of reassurance,

hearts that pulse, synchronised 

to some internalised major chord.

There are no laws for this.

No magnet strong enough,

no theorem neat enough

to chart the chaos of tenderness.

Love is the exception

that keeps rewriting the rule.

For even now,


beneath all reason and ruin,
we are still capable of awe.


And that,
is love’s oldest truth—


that it keeps finding us
long after we’ve stopped looking.

Perhaps,

the modern antidote

is simply two people

still choosing to care.

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