I tell myself
this is simple.

That you are just someone
who came and went
the way people sometimes do—
without ceremony,
without staying.

But nothing about this
feels simple.

You arrived like something
I had no language for—
not loud,
not even certain—
just enough
to shift the air around me.

And I leaned in.

That’s the part I keep returning to—
not you,
but the way I leaned.

Like I had been waiting
without knowing I was waiting.
Like something in me recognized you
before I had time to question it.

You touched places
I had kept quiet for years.
Not broken—
just closed.
Just mine.

And I opened.

Not all at once.
Not recklessly.
But enough.

Enough for you to feel real.
Enough for me to remember
what it’s like
to be wanted by a man
without fear sitting in the room.

And that—
that matters more than I know how to say.

So when you pull away,
it doesn’t just feel like distance.

It feels like something
being taken back
that I didn’t realize
I had given.

And I try to be rational.

You told me.
You said it yourself—
you would be elusive,
that I might want more,
that it would be hard.

You were honest.

But honesty doesn’t soften
the impact.

It just means
I saw it coming
and still stepped forward.

And now I sit here
in the quiet after you,
trying to untangle
what is you
and what is the part of me
that woke up because of you.

Because it would be easier
if it were just you.

But it’s not.

It’s the way I feel
when your name appears.
The way my body remembers you
before my mind catches up.
The way I become softer
in places I had learned
to keep guarded.

And I hate that
I cannot turn that off.

I hate that I still want you
in the same breath
that I am trying to protect myself from you.

I hate that I understand you—
that I see exactly
what you are offering
and what you are not—
and still,
something in me says
stay close.

Not because I am weak.

But because I felt something
real.

Even if it was uneven.
Even if it was incomplete.
Even if it was only ever
meant to exist
in moments that cost you nothing
and cost me everything.

And maybe that is the truth
I am learning to hold—

that I can feel deeply
without being chosen,
that I can open
without being kept,
that I can want
without being met.

But I am not something
that can live in fragments forever.

I am not built
to be returned to
only when it is convenient
to be remembered.

And even now—
even knowing all of this—

if you reached for me,
I know I would feel it.

That pull.
That softening.
That quiet undoing.

And maybe that is
the most honest thing I can say—

not that I am over you,
not that I am broken by you,

but that I am still learning
how to choose myself
in the presence
of something
that almost felt like you.

JMS