My_hot_ass_neighbor

She is not an object. She is a verb. She is the act of leaving your curtains open just a crack. The act of laughing too loud on the phone so the wall might hear. The act of taking out the trash at the exact same moment, not by accident, but by a choreography so subtle it feels like fate.

And in that silence, I understood the file name. It was never about anatomy. It was about ass , the old English word for the donkey—the beast of burden. We are all burdened by the load of our own longing. We carry the heavy cart of what if . The "hot" is the fever of the un-lived. The neighbor is the mirror. my_hot_ass_neighbor

I rename the file. I call it maya.docx . I write this instead of knocking. And in the space between the knock that never comes and the door that never opens, I find the heat. Not in her. In the wanting. Always in the wanting. She is not an object