I wish I had given your sorrows
a bed to rest upon.
Soft enough to hold them
without asking them to leave.
I wish I had placed flowers there,
the kind that once glowed
in your eyes,
the eyes that gave the world
both light and gravity
when it was starving for both.
I wish I had loved you
in a way that steadied you
when chaos gathered.
Loved you in a way that said
it is okay to sink into your own waters,
just do not forget
that love is already swimming there.
I wish I had offered you
a place to rest your head
without convenience choosing for us,
without fear disguising itself as logic,
without love having to ask permission
to stay.
I wish I had kissed you
in the middle of that moment of stress
and reminded you
that you cannot carry the pulse of everyone
when your own heart
is already knotted in your chest.
I wish I had told you
that I did not care what the world thought.
That I was not trying to be an idealist
or a realist,
only honest
about how I felt about you.
Not about what posts said
about the viability of love.
Not about how our fears differed
or mirrored each other.
Why was that ever the loudest concern.
I wish I had been honest about my fears.
My fear.
My fear that you would fall out of love with me
for the same reason you once loved me.
My fear that I was most visible to you
only when I was hurting,
only when I was breaking open,
only when I stood on the edge
of something else.
My fear that I would never know
how to love you
and be loved by you
fully, immersively, without holding back.
My fear of losing sight
of your spirit,
the one I was lucky enough
to witness so clearly.
My fear of forgetting
that silence is allowed,
that love does not always speak,
yet never stops communicating.
I wish I had told you
that the world's rules did not matter.
That however long our love lasted,
it deserved to exist fully,
without apology,
without negotiating with circumstance.
That the reins were ours.
I wish I had not been
so loyal to convenience
and had let love speak first.
Because now there is an emptiness
I created myself,
and all it holds are love scars.
Grass we laid on.
Sentences we shared.
Bodies intertwined.
Heads resting on shoulders.
I wish I had not been so focused
on getting it right,
and had trusted
that being present
was enough.
I wish I had spoken honestly
without reaching for grand language,
without needing to justify the feeling
by enlarging it.
I wish I had told you
that I was scared.
Not scared of losing you.
Just scared.
Because I loved you
so deeply
that it awakened a fear
I had only ever heard named before.
A fear of myself.
I have many wishes.
But beyond wishing,
there is work.
And I will not let these wishes
remain idle.
I will become the garden
that love can grow in.
Because not being able
to give love
to the one I loved
hurts.
My heart hurts
for what I learned too late.
It does.
What if I had known at the time how to be honest about how I felt?
How I feared?
Why does it always take so long for me to recognize the simplest things?
Because I can say one thing with assurance, had I not been so concerned about so many things that did not matter and let her in, even if it meant admitting to not knowing,
She would have met me there each time.
I wish that I had given her the chance to show me how willing she was to love me.
I hope that she knows that I love her.
And that I now think of her sometimes when I go down flights of stairs.
She just wanted to know me, honestly, and all I wanted to do was hide me, earnestly.
