The Match

She is the answer

to a question I was still

learning how to ask

but the answer arrived

in a language

I was never taught to speak.

She builds things.

Not houses —certainties.

Books open easier in her hands.

Roads shorten beneath her feet.

Even the stray dogs

seem to understand

they have been chosen.

She would cross an ocean

for a stranger's wound,

hold a dying bird

with surgical hands

and a mother's tremble.

She runs. She leads. She gives.

She does everything

I have ever dreamed

of doing beside someone.

She kneels in a direction

I have never learned to face.

Her spirit and mine

may share a sky,

but we worship

different patches of the blue.

Her convictions are a wall

built from a stone

I do not recognize

beautiful, ancient,

and not mine to climb.

And beside her

stands a man

who already knows

the prayers I cannot say.

She believes in one love. Only one. Ever.

So do I.

And isn't that the cruelest symmetry

to share even the philosophy

of the blade

that cuts you?

Her loyalty,

the very thing

that makes her luminous,

is the lock

I will never pick.

So I am left

striking myself

against a life that will not light

and the struggle is not

to stop loving what she is.

The struggle is to stop recognizing

what we almost were.