Telling The Moon What I Couldn’t Tell You

but I will not hide behind metaphor —

I want these words to stand bare,

so you can understand,

and I can witness the truth of my own hurt.

I have come to a quiet realization:

I have lost you.

Not to death —

but to distance that breath still cannot cross.

My father still walks the earth,

yet the father I knew

and the child I was to him

have faded like a photograph left in the sun.

You are still here —

but not here for me

the way you once were.

You have grown into a new life,

a new home,

a new father to a new family —

whom I love,

and for whom I have folded my sorrow small

and kept it hidden in my chest

so your happiness would not tremble.

Still, it aches —

to learn that what I believed was forever

was only a season,

already past,

already gone.

By all expectation, you should show the years.

And yet here you are —

the burden of the shame you gave me.

For the sake of your joy,

I chose silence,

I chose a practiced smile.

Yet behind it,

shame blooms in the dark—

lurking, ravenous,

Love will carve its quiet marks upon your soul,

and only slowly will time erase the paths it made.

I recited in full—

while you forgot

And I’d still follow it again,

Even if time rewound a thousand skies,

It stirs something in me I wish would stay quiet, a cruel kind of comfort that still feels like hope

But we never wanted the same things at the same time, did we?

You won’t choose me, and maybe I wouldn’t have chosen you fully either.

But you never chose me.

My favourite songs, the stories I used to tell you, even the food and places I brought you to,

Now they are all yours. They carry your name.

And I’m still here,