Work Text:
“For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks.”
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
I write this where the night forgets my name,
Where every thought arrives already tame;
I leave no map, no answer, no defense,
Just words that learned too late what they condense.
They called us brothers, said it like a cure,
A way to make what bound us feel secure;
That word was safe, and safety let us stay,
While something else kept quietly at bay.
I loved you in the ways that would not show,
In careful steps, in things we’d never know;
Each silence was a promise tightly kept,
Each truth a debt I chose not to accept.
We learned restraint like others learn a trade,
With steady hands and choices carefully made;
I mistook distance for a form of grace,
And hid my wanting in its proper place.
There was no single moment I could blame,
No burning fault, no unmistakable shame;
Just time that asked me gently what I’d lose,
If I continued not to ever choose.
You stood beside me, close but never near,
A constant that made everything else clear;
I thought that if I kept that balance right,
The cost would never fully come to light.
I told myself that love was something earned,
By never wanting more than could be learned;
But love, ignored, does not dissolve or fade,
It waits inside the rules we’re proud we made.
I watched you live with something like belief,
While I rehearsed endurance as relief;
You called it strength to carry what we were,
I called it fate, and thought that made it pure.
We spoke of futures as abstract designs,
Of parallel, respectable lines;
I never said the truth I felt each day:
That all my roads were shaped to lead your way.
I left before you asked me to remain,
So leaving looked like choice and not like pain;
I called it kindness, called it setting free,
And never named what it was costing me.
There was no goodbye worthy of the word,
No final sound you needed to have heard;
Just absence learning slowly how to grow,
Into the only thing I’d ever know.
They say that some connections never end,
They only change the name by which we bend;
But loss is honest, even when it’s mild,
It keeps the shape of what was never tried.
I loved you most where nothing went astray,
Where all our rules were perfectly obeyed;
The damage lives in how we kept them whole,
And starved the truth we could not safely hold.
If you are angry, let it come and go,
Anger is something living people know;
I will not argue, justify, or plead,
I chose the quiet way to intercede.
Do not search backward for a single flaw,
There is no secret breach, no broken law;
Just one man built for standing still too long,
Mistaking silence for the shape of strong.
Remember me as someone who was kind,
For kindness is the least I’ll leave behind;
Forget the parts that never learned to speak,
They were not brave — just careful, tired, weak.
I could not live inside the truth we made,
It asked for more than I was taught or gave;
So I am leaving you what I could not:
A life unmeasured by the things we fought.
This is not courage, nor a final stand,
It is the loosening of my hand;
I am so tired of living half-alive,
Of knowing what I love and letting it survive.
If peace exists, I hope it finds you first,
Unburdened by the silence that I nursed;
I loved you in the only way I knew —
By stepping back, and calling it untrue.
And if you ever wonder what was real,
What part of us I could not let you feel:
It was not doubt, or fear, or something new —
It was the simple fact I loved you too.