There is a kind of pain
that arrives only when the truth does—
not loud, not violent,
but quiet enough to shatter a man
from the inside out.
Your words reached me
like a snowstorm falling over a field
where something beautiful almost grew
but never had the season it needed.
You told me
you were once open to me—
open with a tenderness you do not give easily,
open in the soft flame of your last
unguarded moment,
open before time dimmed
the sacred light of possibility
that lives in a woman’s body.
And I wasn’t there.
I didn’t see you.
I didn’t know how rare you were,
how precious that window was,
how much of yourself
you were willing to offer
to the right hands.
Now I stand in the ruins
of choices made on roads
that led nowhere.
I come to you
not as the man I wish I were—
but as the man left standing
after a storm I created.
You told me you once waited
with the kind of hope
that could have built a life with me,
that everything I handed another
could have been the world you and I built
side by side.
You said I chose a different path,
and now the consequences
sit heavy on my shoulders.
And in your quiet strength,
you told me your answer,
an answer born not of anger
but of the sad wisdom
of a woman who loved once
in a way she will not love again:
No.
Not now.
Not like this.
Those words
were not meant to wound
but they wounded all the same,
because they came from a place
I never reached in time—
that rare place inside you
where love might have lived
had I arrived sooner.
You told me to run
to the child
whose face I barely know,
to hold the only innocent soul
caught in the crossfire of my life.
You told me she is the girl
who needs me most,
the one claim I cannot deny,
the one love I must not fail.
And I hear you.
Every part of me hears you.
Your voice lives in the silence
between my heartbeats,
reminding me that in another life—
a better-timed one—
we could have stood on the same side of fate.
But this is the life we have.
This is the moment we stand in.
And this is the ache I carry—
the ache of knowing
that I found you too late,
when the door had already closed
to protect the woman
you had to become
in order to survive this world.
No tragedy is greater
than the love that never began
because it arrived
after its own ending.
