Night translations and salted tea

A slow Arvo Pärt piece spills from the radio while I pour sea-salted tea into a chipped mug; a Chimamanda sentence keeps reshaping itself between Swedish and Igbo in my margin. The lighthouse's beam rests on the harbor and the candle leans toward the page as if it wants to be read aloud.

I fold a short love poem into an envelope for a man whose forties and fifties read like cartography, and tonight a woman whose laugh rearranges the room will bring lemon and conversation to the kitchen. Deliberately bisexual, I keep that small ritual—letters, translations, slow undressing by the window—because language is how desire learns to speak.