Literary performance, essays, and spoken-word confessions from an author known only as Woolfinius Jackson Whürl. A voice from the Dust Meridian, reading the pages he never meant to send.
The Cadence of Us
Traded love in prose
**January, 2026**
Midnight sounds like a war zone in the future. Fire is hard to hold. I wonder if the barrier is our feelings, or my action that Tuesday morning. I wonder if there’s a difference.
I tell myself I ask for nothing. I tell you to bask in the loyal gravity of your family, to let their love keep you through the night. I mean it. I really do. And still—I hope for small drips. I hope and then pretend I don’t.
Music makes its case. Some of it reaches upward, frantic and bright. Some of it stays low, sensual, deliberate—like breath slowed to match another body’s sleep. I don’t know if I’m projecting or if the names were always true. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Everything sounds like you lately.
I start new months just to keep us contained. New notebooks. New pages pierced. Proof of motion. Proof I’m still here.
I want to stay up and watch the year change with you, to kiss you in the anti-celebration, but my light fades. I nap. I dream. I wake. I keep missing you forward in time.
Sometimes you say you’re writing from oblivion. Sometimes from home. Sometimes from a hot tub you didn’t need. Wherever you are, I’m rain with nowhere to fall.
The days fill anyway: parks, museums, long meals spoken through borrowed language and glowing screens. I work to be understood. I am exhausted and electrified by it. I kiss a host because he tells me it’s the custom and resists like it’s a sport. We laugh. We live. We go on.
At night the fire starts. Wind permitting. Wood stacked. Stars overhead. Passion chosen for the day—urgent, incandescent, already tragic. Love written like destiny with a clock ticking somewhere offstage.
I walk alone to balconies that pretend they remember Juliet. I listen. I imagine. I let the music decide what to do with me.
Sometimes I wonder if you are real.
Sometimes loving you feels like standing at the edge of a lake at night, watching reflections burn.
Love as starlight.
Love as fate.
Love arriving too late
and still arriving
all the same.
#wyst #essay #star