Your Perfume Smells of Power

This is how my heart sounds when I look into your eyes.

Not like a gentle thing. Not like something soft enough to survive being held. No, it becomes noise. A violent, electric, merciless rhythm. A fast beat beneath my ribs, something almost mechanical, almost inhuman, like my body has turned into a dark room with flashing lights and no exits. Everything inside me begins to move too quickly. My thoughts blur. My breath catches. My pulse forgets its manners. And there you are, standing across the room as if you have done nothing, as if you have not just walked into my bloodstream and changed the weather there.

Your perfume smells of power.

I do not know how else to say it. It does not simply linger in the air. It commands it. It enters before you do and stays after you leave, like a signature written in smoke against my skin. There is something dangerous about it, something elegant and cruel, something that makes me think of locked doors, lowered voices, expensive darkness, and all the things I should not want. It wraps around me before I can defend myself. It finds the weak places. It teaches my body to remember you before my mind has even finished pretending not to care.

And your voice.

God, your voice.

It sounds like authority. Like a command even when you are only speaking. Like you could ruin me with a sentence and never raise your tone. There is control in it, something steady and unshaken, something that makes everyone listen when you speak. And I hate how much it affects me. I hate the way my body responds before my pride can stop it. I hate the way your words move through the room and somehow find me, even when they are not meant for me. I hate that I can be surrounded by noise, surrounded by people, surrounded by ordinary things, and still hear you as if the world has lowered itself just to make room for your sound.

But it is your eyes that undo me.

Your eyes hide a depth no one talks about. Everyone sees the confidence. Everyone sees the presence, the charm, the calm control, the way you hold the room as if you were born knowing where to stand and how to be watched. But I see something else. Or perhaps I only imagine that I do, because longing has always been a liar with beautiful hands. Still, when I look at you, I feel there is something beneath the surface. Something darker. Something lonely. Something unsaid. Something that lives behind your gaze like a room no one has been allowed to enter.

And eyes do not lie.

That is the worst part.

Mouths can lie. Hands can hesitate. People can perform entire lives in front of each other and never reveal the truth. But eyes betray what the soul tries to bury. And sometimes, when your eyes land near mine, even for a second, even by accident, I feel something inside me split open. I feel as if you have seen me too clearly. As if you have touched me without moving. As if, for one brief and unforgivable moment, the distance between us fades and I am no longer safe inside myself.

You are so close, and yet you are impossibly far.

I watch you from a crowded room only.

That is my place, isn’t it? Somewhere in the background. Somewhere among the ordinary faces. Somewhere between desire and silence. I stand there with my heart acting like a fool, watching you mesmerize everyone around you, watching people lean toward your light without even knowing they are doing it. You speak, and the room bends. You move, and attention follows. You smile, and something sharp twists in me because I wonder how many people have mistaken that smile for an invitation.

And then I wonder if I am one of them.

Would you notice me like I notice you?

Would you feel the shift in the air if I entered the room? Would your eyes search for me, even once, even unwillingly? Would something in you pause if I stood too close? Would you remember the depth of my voice? Would you wonder what I am thinking when I go quiet? Would you imagine my hands, my mouth, my breath, the secret places where I keep all the things I am too afraid to say?

Or am I only haunted because I have made a cathedral out of a glance?

Does your heart skip too?

That question destroys me.

Because mine does. Mine betrays me every time. It stumbles like it has forgotten how to be alive. It rises toward you as if you are a storm and I am a body made of open windows. It embarrasses me with its hope. It humiliates me with its hunger. It turns every look into evidence, every silence into possibility, every accidental closeness into a wound I press my fingers into just to feel it again.

Do you get lost in my eyes like I get lost in yours?

Or is it just me?

What a tragedy that would be.

To be the only one burning. To be the only one falling. To carry this whole violent universe inside my chest while you remain untouched, unaware, untroubled. To ache for someone who can stand so near and never feel the heat. To be drowning in a feeling you do not even know exists. There is a special kind of pain in that, isn’t there? Not the pain of rejection. Rejection at least has a shape. It gives you a wall to break against. But this is worse. This is the pain of uncertainty. The almost. The maybe. The look that lasts too long, or perhaps not long enough. The silence that could mean everything, or nothing at all.

You are a whirlpool I cannot pull myself out of.

I tell myself to step back. I tell myself to be reasonable. I tell myself this is dangerous, foolish, impossible, absurd. I tell myself that desire is not destiny, that chemistry is not truth, that a glance is not a promise. I repeat these things like prayers I no longer believe in. But then you look at me again, and every argument fades. Every wall becomes water. Every careful distance I built between us dissolves beneath the weight of wanting.

You pull me in harder than gravity.

And the worst part is that I know it.

I know what is happening. I see the disaster while walking toward it. I can name the wound before it opens. I can feel the fall before the ground disappears. And still, I move closer inside my mind. Still, I imagine what it would be like to stand before you with no crowd between us, no world watching, no rules pressing their cold hands against our throats. I imagine your voice lower, closer, meant only for me. I imagine the heat of your breath near my ear. I imagine your fingers finding my waist as if they had always known where to belong. I imagine the terrible silence before a kiss, the kind of silence that makes the whole body tremble because it knows something is about to be lost forever.

Sometimes I hate myself for wanting that.

Sometimes I want it so badly I cannot breathe.

There are moments when my thoughts become unbearable. They do not stay innocent. They do not remain still. They move toward you with hunger. They undress the distance between us. They imagine your hands with a devotion that feels almost sinful. They imagine my back against a wall, your body too close, your voice stripped of its public control, your mouth saying my name as if it had finally found the word it was made for. They imagine the kind of touch that would ruin the language of restraint. The kind of kiss that would make me forget every reason I was supposed to stay away.

And I know I should be ashamed of how vividly I want you.

But I am tired of pretending my body is not part of this confession.

Because it is.

My body knows you before I allow myself to admit your name. It reacts to the smallest things. The way your sleeve moves when you lift your hand. The shape of your mouth when you are thinking. The calm cruelty of your composure. The way your eyes hold something back and give just enough to keep me starving. It is humiliating, how little it takes. One glance. One word. One brush of proximity. One second of your attention, and suddenly I am no longer composed. I am heat beneath skin. I am breath caught in the wrong place. I am a thought turning dangerous in the dark.

To burn for someone who does not know they are the match.

That is what this is.

You move through your life, perhaps unaware, perhaps untouched, while I am left carrying the fire. You have no idea how often you return to me. How often I replay a look. How often I wonder if I imagined the pause in your gaze. How often I build entire impossible conversations out of nothing but a moment. You have no idea how many versions of you exist inside my head. The one who notices. The one who wants. The one who steps closer. The one who says my name softly enough to break me. The one who feels the same pull and has been fighting it too.

And then there is the real you.

The unreachable one.

The one across the room.

The one surrounded by voices and light and people who do not know that I am quietly falling apart just from watching you exist.

So I switch between I do not care and overthinking everything at once, like it is an ordinary Tuesday.

I become ridiculous. I become impossible to live with. One moment, I am cold. Detached. Amused by my own weakness. I tell myself I am above this. I tell myself I am only intrigued. Only curious. Only temporarily enchanted. And then the next moment, I am dissecting every look, every gesture, every shift in your tone. I am trying to read meaning from air. I am trying to decide whether your eyes lingered because they wanted to, or because I needed them to. I am turning madness into analysis and calling it self-control.

But it is not control.

It is obsession dressed in silence.

It is longing with its hands folded politely in its lap.

I keep pretending I can drown these feelings I should not have. I push them down. I bury them beneath reason, beneath pride, beneath all the things I know and all the things I fear. But feelings like this do not drown. They learn to breathe underwater. They wait beneath the surface. They become stronger in the dark. And every time I think I have mastered them, you appear again, and the water rises to my throat.

You took the ground from under my feet.

No.

You ripped it away.

There was no warning. No mercy. No chance to prepare myself. One moment, I was standing in my own life, steady enough, whole enough, convinced enough that I knew the shape of my own heart. And then your eyes landed on mine, and something in me gave way. Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just completely. The floor disappeared. The world tilted. And I have been falling ever since.

Falling toward you.

Falling through myself.

Falling into a version of longing that has teeth.

And the most frightening part is that I let myself.

I let myself fall.

I let myself imagine. I let myself ache. I let myself return to the thought of you even when it hurts. I let myself stand in the fire and pretend I am only cold. Because what choice do I have? You took that choice the first time your eyes found mine. You may not have meant to. You may not even know what you did. But something in me answered you before I could stop it. Something ancient. Something reckless. Something starving.

And now I am here.

With my heart sounding like a fast, desperate beat in a dark room.

With your perfume still living somewhere in my memory.

With your voice still pressing itself against places no one else reaches.

With your eyes still pulling me under.

And I do not know whether this is desire, madness, tragedy, or a prayer.

I only know that when I look at you, I lose the shape of myself.

I only know that I want what I should not want.

I only know that every time I try to step away, something in me turns back.

And maybe that is the real tragedy.

Not that I am falling.

But that a part of me no longer wants to be saved.