Gah, wow. I love the unfulfilled need in this. I love the line "as if testing to see if he’s just an apparition." That sense of riding on the edge of tangibility/intangibility and having/not having is so perfectly summed up in that one image, and the way I read the poem, that was the climactic moment in which it could all disappear and fade away or solidify into something substantial as the next lines showed.

Really lovely.

I don't know why it took me until erasureathon to find your writing, and I did, and I'm playing much catchup and enjoying the Merlin and BDS fics.