Work Text:
I kept my love for you as a breath held
underwater, learned to live
in the blue-green quiet of it.
You spoke, and I watched the light
shift on the rim of your cup,
losing your face as you drank it up.
I think I loved you best
by not loving you out loud.
You needed a friend
to rest your wildness on,
and so I folded my hands in my lap,
looked at the floor when you laughed,
studied the river’s skin when you undressed
behind the reeds, and I said
nothing, nothing at all,
as if silence were a gift I could wrap
and leave at your door.
Even when the nights grew long and wrong—
when you came back from the battlements
with your mouth set like a new scar,
when you pushed the food away
and held the skull as if
it were a question only you could hear—
I never touched your wrist.
I was proud of that, in a dry, biblical way.
Now the light slants
on the flagstones, and the air
tightens like a string
before it snaps. When you go—
and something whispers you will go
soon, terribly, all at once—
I will be the one who tells them
you were a friend, my friend,
and I will mean it as the greatest love
that ever closed its mouth
and swallowed.
I knew. Of course I knew.
The way you set the book between us
on the bench, your finger
just shy of mine, the caution
whose existence betrayed itself.
I could have reached across
so many small gaps — the scarf
you picked up from the reeds,
the ink drying on your letter
that never quite told me to stay.
I could have ended the game
had I not seen
what soon was due,
the way a man in a fever sees
the water he cannot reach:
the poison cooling in the cup,
the foil’s button, the stage
that would be a bier.
And you: left alone
in the hall, holding my story.
How much harder if you had to hold
the nights as well as the days, the yes—
So I played the madman
better than I needed to,
shouting at clouds, making
my love look like distraction,
like the flailing of a mind
too sick to notice what burned
in your silent, steady eyes.
I let you believe I was a house
so full of ghosts
there was no room for you,
when really you were the only room
I ever wanted to die in.
My only honest lie.
My only kindness too:
that you will stand at the end
and tell them I was your friend,
and your grief will be a single door
closing once, not the whole sky
falling on your head.
I loved you enough to be nothing
more than a tragedy: one death,
not two, the heart unspoken
never knowing the weight
it was spared.