15. What Remains​

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Not regret or the wish to return.

 

I love him now more freely
because I see him more clearly.

 

The boy he did not hide.

 

His weakness without shame,

his confusion,
his incompleteness,
his inability to hold what he ignited.

 

He did not dress it up as strength.
He did not disguise his limits with pride.

He let me see him
as unfinished.

 

Like a child does
before the world teaches concealment.

 

To me he stood exposed
in his not knowing,
in his wanting without capacity,
in his longing without skill.

 

Love deepened as the relationship ended.

 

I was no longer loving an idea,
or a future,
or a story that might have been.

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There is tenderness in seeing a man
who does not know how to protect himself from his own limits.

 

There is freedom in loving someone
without asking him to become more than he is.

 

This love is not romantic.

It just is.