fallow valley
Dear friend,
I should tell you something I rarely admit aloud,
my behavior is a map drawn long before you arrived unbowed.
Ink by hands that taught me to flinch,
to shrink, to doubt, to cringe, to clinch,
before I even learned to walk toward warmth,
or believe the world might be kind, or safe, or calm henceforth.
I wear confidence like a well-tailored coat,
stride with ease, speak with certainty afloat.
Pretend the world hasn’t carved its name
into the softest parts of me, the same.
Yet truth has its own weight, its quiet gloat,
sometimes, when the night leans too close, I float.
I break in ways no one sees,
silent, shaking, crying under the moon with ease.
With no tears, no sound,
only the tremble of a body remembering what it had found,
what it swore it would forget too soon,
like shadows lingering in the corner of the room.
Dear friend,
if I pull away without warning, bending,
or apologize for things that never needed mending,
know it isn’t you I am fleeing,
it’s the echo of old hands, old losses agreeing.
Old endings I memorized before I ever learned beginnings,
a ghost within me—persistent, never freeing.
Always whispering that good things tremble,
that love, like glass, can break at the edges assembled.
And so even when I find safety in you,
a rare, quiet place where I can rest my breath true,
my bones still brace for impact,
old instincts don’t retire just because a new light acts.
They crouch, they wait,
they remind me of every time warmth turned to cold fate,
too quickly, too sharply,
too often for a child who didn’t yet know what leaving meant, partly.
empty flare