I loved you
the way you love something fragile—
with patience,
with care,
with all I could hold without breaking it.

You loved me
from behind old doors,
careful not to let the hinges creak,
afraid that if you opened too wide
something would be taken from you again.

I saw how closeness scared you.
How my fears felt like a trap.
How pushing away wasn’t absence,
but armor learned too young.

I kept offering you safety,
not realizing
you didn’t yet know how to live
without guarding yourself from it.

There was so much potential between us—
not imagined,
not exaggerated—
real and breathing and waiting.
But the past kept stepping between us,
answering for you
when you couldn’t.

I’ve asked myself—
what did I do
to be rewritten this way?
Turned into a threat
when my love was offered freely,
and my heart unarmed?

Disappointment, sadness, grief—
an alchemy forged from sorrow,
because I loved you deeply,
and I still do,
in that quiet way love becomes
when it desperately searches,
but has no place to go.

And even now, after all this time,
that truth remains—
as a record
of how clearly I saw you,
and how honestly I loved,
and what you weren’t yet ready to hold.

–The Nonconformist