The Words I Never Said

I loved you.

I loved you like a hurricane:

loudly, chaotically,

trampling those I loved in my careless frenzy.

You were the hurricane, leaving destruction in your wake, leaving me to clean it up. I was not a watcher of storms nor a keeper of men. I was not a lover of myself nor of feeling alone.

I loved you.

Like a cat loves its string,

a child loves its toy,

there was some sort of comfort in company.

There was always some sort of company in companionship. You were somebody familiar, vulnerable, and I was someone who fell in love as if nothing could ever go wrong.

It was sunny, the smell of

new love and revelation,

sweeping me up in its wave faster than I could breathe. It's nice to feel heard, to feel cared for.

I loved you.

But you know what they say. It it feels too good to be true, it probably is.

In a flurry of impatience and miscommunication, it all turns to dust. I'm walking on eggshells, dancing around broken glass with bare feet,

weary from the tedious journey of attempting not to set

the time-bomb off

( but it always went off ).

The problem with storms is they often come without warning,

too unpredictable for me to prepare myself,

too destructive for me to clean up the mess.

But I was a storm too, raging quietly, beating down on the same spots each time I rained.

And I loved you.

And I loved the rainbow that greeted me after the storm soiled the earth.

Sometimes, love isn't enough to stay. Other days, it's all you have to make sense of the pounding on the window,

and the pavement slapping underneath your feet.

And you were chaos: the sort of noise that echoed in my head when I shut my eyes

and the sort of mess that left remnants long after it was cleaned

and somehow, I was always the one to clean up the mess.

But I loved you,

though it seemed like such a game,

an incurable addiction that left me crippled and

growing through the tiniest cracks in the sidewalk stones.

When you asked me to marry you, you became the man of my dreams, a man I'd known for years and whom I'd treasured in so many ways.

You were a man of mystery, shrouded in trauma and mental illnesses that made me relate to you,

like you were a friend I'd been waiting my whole life for.

Friends don't let friends drive drunk.

The thing I loved most about you, in the beginning, was your vulnerability.

A man who confided in me in the dead of night,

when all the streetlights had gone out and neither of us could sleep.

I love(d) your passion, your openness

( and perhaps I was just a tad bit lonely, at the time ).

What's wrong with being lonely?

I've learned something important, in my twenty seven years.

It matters much more. I'd rather spend my life being lonely than being stifled

by things I don't believe in, by people who don't believe in me.

Despite the turbulence of the ride I took with you, you taught me a lot, and so I really don't consider it a waste. You were there/here/everywhere,

tearing me down and then picking me up again,

like a puppet-master, leaving its puppet crumpled and tired after use. I'm not good at games.

I loved you.

The you that sat crying at the birth of your child,

who left scattered messages of fondness on my social media,

promising to be good to me, to keep me safe

from the storm that was you.

I used to think in order to find the rainbow, I had to live through the storm.

But normal storms don't leave me stranded and

cold,

standing in a thin pair of pajamas in a puddle by the road.

Normal storms have never left me frightened for my safety

and contemplating

the thought of jumping the bridge and swimming to safety. We both knew I couldn't swim.

I loved you.

Ferociously, like a wind that devoured me whole.

I can hear the thumping of the ocean in my ears, and it consumes me the same way you did.

I can see your face in my son, and I cannot help he won't grow up to be like but hopeyou. For he is a quiet chaos and a pure-hearted spirit,

and you peel off the wound without addressing the pain it gives me.

Your pain is not mine.

It never was.

And I loved you, desperately, so that I sometimes forgot to breathe.

I can breathe.