What We Could Not Carry

You loved me
like the ocean loves a reckless swimmer,
wild enough to drag me under,
faithful enough to keep pulling me back.

Your temper came like sudden weather,
heat rising fast in your chest,
something breaking into sound
before either of us knew what it meant.

And me,
all runaway heart,
restless pride,
leaving like every rupture was final,
returning like it never was.

Still,
it never ended.

You would look at me afterward,
tired,
unguarded,
as if nothing had closed between us.

No keeping score.
No memory turned sharp.
Just air clearing itself again.

Things moved through you
like summer storms through trees,
violent,
brief,
gone.

And we would fall back together
as if nothing had broken.

Foreheads touching.
Breath returning.
Kissing like something barely surviving itself
between disasters.

There was something almost holy
in the way you stayed open.

Not calm.
Not contained.
Open.

You loved me
like the ocean loves a reckless swimmer,
letting me disappear,
still pulling me back,
without hesitation.

I did not yet understand
that safety can exist
and still feel out of reach
when you cannot receive it.

Only later
did I see the weight you carried
inside all that fire.

I would leave like leaving meant absence.
Already gone.

You stayed.
Same place.
Same open air.
As if I had only stepped out of weather
and not out of love.

Something shifted,
without announcing itself.

What felt like closeness began to press.
What felt like love began to have edges.

We stopped landing in each other.
We started breaking.

I became unsteady,
not because love left,
but because it stopped holding me in place.

I still tried to reach it,
still tried to repair what was already moving away.

Then came a kind of knowing
that did not open anything.
It shut me down.

I saw how deeply you felt for me,
and I could not hold it anywhere in me.

It was not only you.
It touched everything already cracked in me,
everything already bracing for loss.

There were things I did not understand for years,
a mother’s fear,
a moment misread,
a story that hardened before it could be corrected.

Much later,
I understood how quickly fear becomes truth
when no one knows how to undo it.

I never had time to fully mourn it.
I did not want the ending.

Still,
it had already passed its shape.
I could not stay inside it.

So I froze,
not leaving,
not returning,
just suspended
between what I knew,
and what I could not carry.

After that,
I carried it differently,
not as something I was inside,
but something that stayed inside me.

Life kept unfolding anyway,
without asking.

What we were did not disappear.
It changed density.

It stopped being a place,
and became weight.

And it haunted me for decades.

I held on for years without meaning to,
not as memory,
but as something still unfinished in my hands,
and a kind of guilt that never had a place to go.

It was a misunderstanding.
It was a misunderstanding.
It was a misunderstanding.