a love that demands

some love stories never had a name, let alone a beginning. this poem is what remains when language fails and silence overstays. it’s not a confession. it’s not a plea. it’s a reckoning with the kind of love that hides behind intellect, retreats behind poetry, and pretends its ache is too complicated to speak aloud.

i wrote this to end the loop i’ve been stuck in—where i do the emotional labor of feeling both sides, deciphering the unsaid, naming the connection while the other person curates a distance made of suggestion. this poem is the last time i carry what isn’t mine to carry. it is the final offering of clarity for something that was always obscured by its own refusal.

and maybe you’ll find something of your own here too—if you’ve ever loved someone who wouldn’t say it but couldn’t leave it alone either.

you bruised my heart.
maybe i broke yours.
we haven’t gotten around to discussing the matter,
so it may very well be spun the other way around.

i’m not vowing what exists here will work—
because it takes two voices for an exchange of dialogue.
instead, i'm following through on a vow
that has recently written itself into my heart—
one that asks me not to betray
the instincts that make me human.

this inescapable mortality
that has made itself known to me—
pierced blood through my veins
and bled light through all of my shadows.

it is precisely the reason
i see you more clearly now than ever.

i understand there must be
some protruding part deep inside you
that cuts you into silence before you can speak.
it's why i've always had to string the sounds
straight out of your lips,
even when the burden was yours to voice.

still—
how much can anyone truly lose
in expressing themselves?

whether it may be fury or shame,
what could possibly fracture inside of you
that hasn't already?

this isn't to pathologize you;
in fact, it's quite the opposite.
i'm giving you a gift
i don't think you have begun to explore:
the nature of humanizing another so deeply
that you cannot simply be angry at their disposition.

but the fact is
that i’ve indulged in this dynamic far more than i should have—
though i don’t dare to regret it.

your presence, even if
rendered to a memory,
remains replayed in my body—
an endless loop of synapses
that demanded i search for
the clarity i never received.

in doing so,
i have realized the torture of your love—
both for your own psyche
and the one who lives inside of it.

see, you’ve tasked me
to heal wounds you won’t let me touch.
you hold my image not in a photograph,
but a holograph—
distorting through the dark recesses of your mind.

for you, i am both the sacred and the sacrilegious.
i'm neither of these things—
i'm only a person who happens to love you.

it is a product of this love
that i am able to see you without shattering you.
but my love can only build
those who are soulful enough to enter completely.

so yes, i’m familiar with your tortured character—
not simply through you,
but in the remnants that refract
through my own reflection.

i've lost myself in the sands
that silt your feet into captivity.
truthfully, i was born in and of it.

love existed at a distance for many a reason,
and like you,
it was this inaccessibility
that hung my mouth dry in the thirst of it.

as you can see,
i have answered a lot of my questions
on my own.

now i'm just wondering
how a lover of literature
reckons with the eternal consequence
that is keeping their heart locked & shut.

you might read the novels,
bear the brain that contains their text—
but you don’t live their truths.

still,
your present silence
is your loudest admission.

it’s peculiar,
and pitiful.

you can piece together the syllables in poem.
you can draw circles around your desires
with your teasing mouth.
you can place me on a pedestal
far removed from your heart
that absolves your accountability entirely.

still,
the feeling remains.

and all these words you’ve chosen to withhold—
what could i make of them,
when your craven inclinations beseech me
to read signs that enter as a mirage?

my delusion you must pray for,
an avoidance you make me pay for.

so i read.
still, i understand.

not of craze—
instead,
from an overwhelming lucidity.

it’s a game you play.

but we aren’t children in a maze.

i don’t care to live
any longer
in this haze.

even my words reduce themselves to rhyme
to match the madness
you create in your mind.

if you so fear the free will i've offered you,
let me draw the space
for you to appear within.

you beg for anything but silence,
while i’ve been listening
between the lines
for years now.

i never felt it productive
to force you
to write out all your cards on the table.
i figured you might flip the table and run.

it seems you’ve done just that—
while i’ve circled back in the room
several times
to see if my cards
have finally been matched.

regardless,
i've learned to listen
for the cards you only ever play
in silence.

by now,
the echoing craters framing my expression
have deepened—
capturing and dissecting your heart's dwellings—
the ones your mind couldn’t bear to hear.

i’ve always spoken freely to your shadows—
the ones you don’t even visit yourself.
they've whispered to me
all of your inhibitions.

still,
i never uttered them back to you.

eventually,
the rhythm of my heartbeat
turned a song scored by your name—
yet i did everything but run away.

instead,
i placed your hand on my chest
so your soul would rise
with the symphony of love
i suspended us both into—

my words holding my own,
and the burden you couldn’t bear to hold.

but that’s no longer my role.

you simply won’t admit to yourself
that the melody rang in your ears
long before i sang it to you.

now my voice
has grown tired.

the words wane within me.

and this silence between us?
born of secrecy
before it ever really began.

do you see it now?
the crux of this
was never in the separation.

so if i assume you are in agony,
then i must ask why.

what about a “friendship”
could elicit such a calamitous unraveling?

you must know more than most
that a love never defined
is a love that is promised for dissolution.

how could an assumption—
so frail and flexible—
vehicle an ache
that asks for more?

you take for granted
what words can convey.

if there is truth in your heart,
let me hear it.

if it is pain you hold to my memory,
let me feel it.

if it is regret,
let me hold it.

if it is shame,
let me see it.

if it is love,
let me live in it.

now i have said it
in every iteration that i can.

we either make sense of this together—
or forfeit our senses entirely
as our admonition.

but you can’t sit
somberly in your thoughts
acting as though
there is nothing left for you to do.

i choose to reveal my heart ravenously;
i've reduced myself
to a reverent prayer
to love itself.

i’m unscathed in this act,
for i've become a servant to the seasons—
shedding the skins
that no longer serve me.

if i am still entirely wrong
in my assumptions,
the worst of this
is just a few scratches to my ego.

yet you won't even endow me
in embarrassment
out of greater dread
of your own.

it has always been—
and remains—
your choice.

if you continue
to percolate away in your poems,
i’ll only ever peruse you
through your dreams.

i won’t force your hand,
as you’ve asked;

i’ll only graze my fingers
across yours
one last time,
as i move closer
towards this end.

would you honor your heart—
not even for me,
but for those tender wounds
that crave meeting mine
for just a moment longer?