The Man He Loved in the Dark

You left a last letter, as though a life could be explained,

Once there was no life left to answer for its scars;

You wrote of respectable faces walking in the sun,

While you had learned to make your dwelling in the dark.

You said the best of you was discarded long ago,

And what remained had learned to live without a name;

You could have carried on that way, as others do,

Until my presence made you look at yourself again.

Love was not a gentle light when it entered you;

It stripped away the shelter of your compromises bare;

The man you had accepted suddenly seemed strange,

When you imagined how he might appear to me.

You spoke of hands that had known too many women,

And swore that mine would never feel their touch;

Not from a lack of longing, but from something deeper-

You thought your darkness would contaminate what you loved.

You told me you had never wounded those beside you,

That pain had often been something you endured;

You wanted to change, to leave that life behind,

But wanting freedom is not knowing how to escape.

You called yourself a prisoner of a slippery pit,

Too deep to climb, too steep to find a way;

And I became the impossible dream that frightened you,

Because I made another life seem possible.

You chose an ending while your love was still alive,

Believing death could keep its innocence intact;

You drew a boundary I had never asked for,

And called your disappearance an act of love.

Your letter reached me after you were gone,

Leaving your truth where you could no longer stand;

You feared I would answer with hatred or pity,

But grief was the only thing I could understand.

You called yourself ruined, as though ruin were a law,

As though the past could seal a person's fate;

I wondered who had taught you that broken things

Must remain broken simply because they broke.

You thought you were protecting me from yourself,

But you also took from me the right to choose;

I might have hated you, I might have walked away,

I might have stayed-but you never let me decide.

Now I see respectable faces differently,

And wonder what darkness waits behind their eyes;

How many carry lives they cannot speak about,

How many learn to hide until they disappear.

Love is not a mirror measuring who deserves it,

Nor a verdict passed upon a damaged soul;

Sometimes it is simply the courage to remain,

When truth makes staying harder than leaving.

You finally told me who you believed you were,

But silence followed before I could reply;

You left before I could tell you what I might have seen-

Not the man you were, but the man you might become.

You thought the darkness would be safer without you,

That absence would spare me what your presence might cost;

But you left me with a question no death can answer:

What if the man I loved was still becoming himself?