until we're old and gray

The evidence is filed against me.

There are ghosts behind me

that still know my name.

There are wounds I have caused,

sins I have carried,

and failures that follow me

like shadows at sunset.

But if the heavens bear witness to anything,

let it be this:

I have never ceased trying.

Never ceased wrestling with the man I am

for the sake of the man I aspire to become.

And though I make my way toward it,

often wounded and burdened by shame,

I am still moving forward.

Still chipping at stone.

Still striving to leave behind

I had to dig him up.

Dig through the years.

Dig through the rubble,

the bad decisions,

the stories I built

to survive myself.

Dig up the bones.

Not to resurrect him.

Not to become him again.

Only to prove

he was real.

Because sometimes I think

you look at the man standing before you

and forget

he was built on the grave

of a thousand unfinished versions.

The boy.

The dreamer.

The coward.

The fighter.

The man who loved poorly.

The man who loved desperately.

The man who mistook endurance

for healing.

They’re all buried here somewhere.

And if you listen closely,

he’s still beneath the surface.

Still incomplete.

Still on his knees.

Still screaming questions

into a silence

that never seemed interested in answering.

I dug him up

so you could see

that I did not arrive whole.

I arrived becoming.

And perhaps that process

never ends.

Because I won’t disappear.

I know that much.

But God,

I disappoint.

Myself most of all.

Daily, it seems.

Every sunset finds another flaw.

Another weakness.

Another place where intention

failed to become action.

Another reminder

that growth leaves scars

where certainty used to be.

Yet somehow,

beneath all that rubble,

something keeps beating.

Can you feel my heart?

Not the wounded parts.

Not the frightened parts.

The living part.

The part that somehow survived.

The part that loves

with a force I still don’t understand.

Because the truth is

I love you in excess.

In quantities language

was never designed to carry.

And I don’t know how.

I don’t know where it comes from.

I don’t know why it remains

through disappointment,

through distance,

through every season

that should have diminished it.

I only know it’s here.

Persistent as breath.

Stubborn as sunrise.

Refusing every invitation

to become less.

So I’ll stay.

Through the fading light.

Through the golden hours

when everything softens

and the world finally tells the truth

about what matters.

I’ll stay

and offer what I have.

My hands.

My years.

My stories.

My becoming.

My unfinished heart.

Trying to share a life

that has always felt larger

than any words

I could ever use

Shame on me.

For believing that one day

someone would look past the surface

and decide to stay.

Not for a season.

Not for convenience.

Not until something easier arrived.

Stay.

For believing someone would want

to know me.

Not the edited version.

Not the useful version.

Not the version that performs well

under observation.

But the whole of me.

The unfinished parts.

The contradictions.

The scars.

The hopes I don’t say out loud.

The fears I pretend not to have.

To know me completely

and still move closer.

Shame on me.

For believing someone might want

to be known in return.

Not merely seen.

Known.

The difference is everything.

To be seen is to stand in the light.

To be known is to hand someone

the map to your darkness

and trust them not to get lost.

I thought perhaps

two people could do that.

I thought perhaps

they could spend a lifetime

uncovering each other,

And not assuming they already know.

Like archaeologists of the soul.

Carefully brushing away years

of fear,

pride,

misunderstandings,

and self protection

to discover what was always there.

I thought perhaps

growing old together

was less about growing old

and more about never stopping

the excavation.

Never reaching the end.

Never saying,

“I’ve seen enough.”

Still curious at seventy.

Still fascinated at eighty.

Still finding new rooms

inside a heart you’ve lived beside for decades.

I thought perhaps

love looked like that.

Not grand gestures.

Not perfect compatibility.

But choosing.

Again.

And again.

And again.

Choosing growth

when comfort would be easier.

Choosing understanding

when assumption would be faster.

Choosing tenderness

when resentment feels justified.

Protecting the connection

even when your ego demands victory.

Guarding each other’s hearts

as if they were your own.

Building something real.

Something sturdy enough

to survive the weather.

Something true.

And that’s the funny thing

about truth.

It rarely arrives announced.

Truth is buried.

Beneath assumptions.

Beneath narratives.

Beneath old wounds

that keep repeating themselves

until they sound like facts.

Truth has to be uncovered.

Excavated.

Recovered.

Because most people don’t lose truth.

They cover it.

Layer by layer.

Until eventually

they forget what lies underneath.

But the thing about buried things

is that they remain.

Waiting.

Patiently.

For someone willing

to dig.

And maybe that’s what I’ve been searching for

all along.

Not perfection.

Not certainty.

Not even love.

Just a pair of hands

willing to kneel beside me

in the dirt,

if you’re into that.

You told me once

about the friend you needed.

The one on the park bench.

The one who listens.

The one who makes space.

The one whose presence feels safe.

And I remember sitting there thinking,

you already have him.

You keep searching for water

while standing knee-deep in the river.

You keep describing a home

while living inside one.

And I don’t know if that’s tragic

or simply human.

Because sometimes it feels like

you trust the voice in your head

more than the man standing in front of you.

The voice that says you’re being judged.

The voice that says you’re alone.

The voice that says nobody understands.

The voice that has been wrong before.

And yet somehow

it still gets the deciding vote.

I wish you could see

how much life we’ve lost

to conversations that never happened.

To fears that were never true.

To walls built against dangers

that never arrived.

Because I am not your enemy.

I never was.

And if I wanted less from you,

this would all be easier.

If I didn’t care,

I wouldn’t notice.

If I didn’t love you,

I wouldn’t stay.

If I didn’t desire you,

I wouldn’t still be standing here

having the same conversation

with my heart wide open.

But I do.

That’s the problem.

I desire you.

Not because I need you.

I don’t.

Need is too small a word.

I desire you because out of everyone

who has ever crossed my path,

you’re still the person

I want to tell things to first.

You’re still the person

I want beside me

when something beautiful happens.

You’re still the person

I imagine sitting next to me

when we’re old enough

to laugh at all of this.

And if I’m honest,

what I desire most

isn’t even you.

It’s being desired by you.

Chosen by you.

Not tolerated.

Not managed.

Not fit into the schedule.

Chosen.

The way people choose sunlight

after a long winter.

The way exhausted travelers

choose home.

And here’s where I become difficult.

I have patience for healing.

I have patience for growth.

I have patience for fear.

I have very little patience

for the same wounds

being given authority

over our future.

Because I know there’s a woman inside you

who is stronger than that.

I’ve met her.

I’ve seen her.

The woman who is brave.

The woman who is playful.

The woman who is wise.

The woman who loves deeply

when she stops negotiating with fear.

She’s extraordinary.

And every time she appears,

the room changes.

So stop hiding her from me.

Stop hiding her from yourself.

Come sit on the bench.

Put down the armor.

Tell me what’s actually true.

Because after all these years,

through every version of us,

I’m still here.

Still choosing.

Still building.

Still leaving room beside me.

Hoping one day

you stop standing in the gap between us

I took us to the river

to baptize.

The water was cold enough

to make the body remember

it was alive.

The current moved quietly.

Not with violence.

With certainty.

As though it had been carrying souls

long before it ever carried us.

I held your hand.

You held mine.

And together we stepped forward

until the water reached our waists,

our chests,

our hearts.

The world stood on the shoreline.

All the noise.

All the years.

All the names we had given ourselves.

Waiting behind us.

Then we went under.

And neither of us rushed back.

Beneath the surface,

everything became beautiful.

Your hair floating like dark ribbons.

Your eyes open.

Your fingers still wrapped around mine.

The river taking the weight from our bones.

The silence taking the weight from our lives.

For one impossible moment,

there was no future to fear.

No past to survive.

No distance left to cross.

Only you.

Only me.

Only the strange peace

of finally letting go.

The river kept asking us

to rise.

But neither of us seemed interested.

Because there are moments

so beautiful

they resemble dying.

Not because they destroy you.

Because they ask everything unnecessary

to leave.

And there beneath the water,

looking at you through wavering light,

I understood something.

Love was never the fire.

Love was the drowning.

The willing surrender.

The quiet descent.

The choice to let the current

carry away every version of yourself

that could exist without the other.

Above us,

the sun fractured into a thousand pieces.

Around us,

the river whispered ancient things.

And for a moment,

I wanted nothing more

than to remain there forever,

suspended between death and rebirth,

holding your hand

while the entire world

I miss you in a way

that has nothing to do

with sharing the same room.

And the thing I want most from you

isn’t your body.

It’s the version of you

that only appeared

when you felt completely safe.

Somewhere beneath

the mother,

the responsibilities,

the schedules,

and the exhaustion,

she still lives,

the woman I have never been able

to get enough of.

And I am determined to become the man,

not the one she wants,

the one she needs.

I spent too much time

trying to prove I cared,

thinking love could be demonstrated

through effort and words alone,

like a gardener

leaning over a bud,

willing it to bloom.

But blossoms don’t answer pressure.

They answer seasons.

I am not the sapling you first knew.

I am becoming a tree,

roots deeper,

branches wider,

bearing fruit you can finally take

without guilt

from the garden of our life.

Because when fruit begins to grow,

the promise of harvest follows.

Even unripe fruit can sustain you

if you’re hungry enough.

Devour me.

And I you,

if only you’d stop treating your own abundance

like forbidden fruit.

Let me sit at your roots

in the shelter of your shade,

studying,

consuming,

savoring

everything you produce.

You need no invitation.

Why do you believe I need one?

I am capable of bringing a ladder

and a basket beneath the cover of night,

taking what I desire.

But I know what you truly long for

is not to be taken,

it’s to be climbed carefully,

held gently,

while every branch is explored

with reverence before its fruit is gathered.

So I let patience do its work.

But seasons are faithful to no one.

They keep moving.

And whether we’re ready or not,

the harvest is coming.

I relieve myself at the thought of you.

Not the obvious thoughts.

Not your skin glowing amber beneath a bedside lamp.

Not your hair falling forward like a curtain,

closing the distance between us.

Not the shape of your mouth.

Not the secret language our bodies learn

after years of study.

Not the memories that arrive after midnight,

uninvited and impossibly vivid.

No.

Those are only the doorways…

I relieve myself at the thought of something far more dangerous.

The thought of never giving up.

The thought of waking up beside your soul

for fifty more years

and still reaching for you first.

The thought of choosing each other

on an ordinary Tuesday.

The thought of building a life so intertwined

that neither of us remembers

where one story ends

and the other begins.

The thought of raising the children

who carry pieces of both our faces and attributes.

The thought of watching you become

more completely yourself

with every passing year.

The thought of you feeling safe enough

to place your inner world in my hands

without fear of being misunderstood.

The thought of your walls lowering,

one stone at a time.

The thought of being invited in.

Not into your body.

Into your heart.

Into the hidden rooms.

Into the places no one else sees.

I relieve myself at the thought

of eighty years old.

The house quiet.

The children long grown.

our hands covered in wrinkles.

Your head resting on my shoulder

the same way it did when we were young.

Neither of us beautiful anymore

by the world’s standards.

Neither of us caring.

Still sitting side by side

while evening gathers outside the windows.

Still choosing.

Still reaching.

Still us.

A whole life lived.

Not perfectly.

Not painlessly.

But chosen togetherness.

And sometimes I think

there must be something wrong with me.

Something embarrassingly shallow.

Because other men fantasize about bodies,

And I find myself undone

by the thought of permanence.

By loyalty.

By trust.

By a lifetime of shared sunsets,

shared grief,

shared victories,

shared silence.

By the thought that after everything,

all the misunderstandings,

all the wounds,

all the years,

you would still look at me

and decide to stay.

And God help me,

I want you like I did in your apartment,

when dreamcatchers hung between us

and the future was still hiding in the walls.

I want you like I did by the pool.

Like I did picking you up from work,

counting red lights as stolen minutes.

I want you like I did meeting your father,

trying to appear calm

while carrying an entire horizon inside my chest.

I want you like I did in the back seat of Bridget’s car,

Even with T-bird in the front seat,

It was like only you were there.

I want you like I did during those late-night conversations,

when midnight became two,

and two became four,

and neither of us could find a reason

to stop looking at each other.

I want you like I did walking to Wawa.

Like I did when I lost my job.

Like I did packing everything we owned

and moving eleven hundred miles

toward a life neither of us had ever seen.

I want you like I did when we conceived our children.

Like I did listening for heartbeats.

Like I did standing in hospital rooms

eating pizza from paper plates

while our entire world slept beside us.

I want you like I did talking about finances.

Planning futures.

Building businesses.

I want you like I did when I became distracted.

Like I did Writing songs that became poems

that became books

that became evidence

that I never really stopped writing about you.

I want you like I did through misunderstandings.

Through silence.

Through resentment.

Through the slow accumulation of things

neither of us knew how to carry.

I want you like I did

when the weight became unbearable.

I want you like I did

when another man entered the story.

I want you like I did

walking toward the door.

And I want you like I did

walking back through it.

Because there is a pattern here,

it is impossible to miss.

Every season changed.

Every circumstance changed.

Every certainty changed.

The addresses changed.

The jobs changed.

The bank accounts changed.

The dreams changed.

The wounds changed.

Even we changed.

But there has never been a version of my life

where I did not turn toward you.

That is the inconvenient truth

buried beneath all the noise.

Not that I wanted you once.

Not that I wanted you when things were easy.

Not that I wanted you when you were at your best.

I wanted you through all of it.

The beginning.

The building.

The breaking.

The surviving.

The leaving.

The returning.

I want you the only way I know how.

Without strategy.

Without pride.

Without conditions.

Completely unapologetic.

Because after all these years,

through every version of us,

You were sitting on the countertop,

not like someone waiting,

but like someone who had already made peace with the evening.

A glass of wine balanced between your hands.

The room dim enough

that the shadows softened everything they touched.

You were weaving dreamcatchers.

Pulling thread through empty spaces,

giving shape to something invisible.

And for reasons I still can’t explain,

I couldn’t look away.

The windows were open to the night.

Your locks were unreliable.

Your roommate was gone.

The whole apartment felt unfinished.

Vulnerable.

Like a song still deciding

what it wanted to become.

And there you were,

moving quietly inside it.

Soft.

Not fragile.

Soft the way moonlight is soft.

Soft the way a river bends around stone

without ever surrendering its course.

I remember standing at the edge of the kitchen,

one room away,

feeling as though I had wandered

into something sacred by accident.

Some moments announce themselves.

Most don’t.

Most arrive dressed as ordinary evenings

and only reveal their importance years later.

But even then,

I knew.

Not who you would become.

Not what we would survive.

Just that I needed to know

what lived behind your eyes.

Needed to hear the stories

that made your hands move that way.

Needed to understand

why the room seemed to lean toward you

without realizing it.

I wasn’t nervous.

Nervous implies uncertainty.

I was certain.

Certain in the strange, unreasonable way

a compass is certain of north.

As though some part of me

had already started walking toward you

before the rest of me understood why.

So I brought you my mother’s lasagna.

A simple thing.

A dish wrapped in foil.

A recipe carried through years

and kitchens

and family tables.

I picture that you ate it standing

in the same kitchen.

laughing between bites,

completely unaware

that it was becoming a memory

I would carry for the rest of my life.

Not because of the food.

Because of you.

Because every now and then,

someone appears in the world

and the air around them feels different.

As if life has briefly opened a hidden door

and allowed you to glimpse

something rare.

Something that will not come twice.

I didn’t know

it would be the last lasagna she ever made for me.

Didn’t know that years later

I would reach backward through memory

trying to touch that season again.

The wine.

The dreamcatchers.

The unlocked window.

The girl sitting on the countertop

with thread wrapped around her fingers

and starlight gathering in her hair

and despite her own pain,

still carried warmth in her eyes.

But even if I had known.

Even if someone had whispered

exactly how precious that meal would become.

Exactly how few chances remained.

Exactly how quickly time would move.

I still would have crossed that room.

Still would have stood there

at the edge of the kitchen.

Still would have handed it to you.

Because you don’t protect the memory.

You live it.

You walk directly into it,

There is a mirror in this house

that still thinks I am 30.

Every morning it offers me back

the same familiar man,

the one with darker hair,

smoother corners,

a face that had not yet learned

the weight of carrying years.

And maybe that’s not its fault.

Mirrors only reflect what they have seen.

The trouble is,

I have changed.

There is silver gathering at my temples now.

A mustache where there wasn’t one before.

Tiny rivers branching from the corners of my eyes

from all the years spent squinting into sunlight,

working long days,

searching crowds for people I love.

The face moved forward.

The reflection lingered behind.

And sometimes I wonder

if that’s what happened to us.

If somewhere along the way

you became loyal to an older version of me.

A man who existed,

but no longer lives here.

A man you learned to protect yourself from.

A man you learned to brace against.

A man whose mistakes became a photograph

framed so carefully

that no one noticed the years passing around it.

Meanwhile,

I keep arriving.

Day after day.

Older.

Softer in places.

Stronger in others.

Carrying new scars.

Growing new wisdom.

Learning new tenderness.

Becoming someone

the old reflection has never met.

And still,

the mirror offers yesterday.

As if time has been standing still.

As if these grey hairs

are not quietly counting down the remaining winters.

As if the wrinkles are not tiny clocks

etched directly into my skin.

As if life has not been slipping through our fingers

one ordinary Tuesday at a time.

Because that is the part no one warns you about.

Not the fighting.

Not the distance.

The waiting.

The terrible ease

with which two people can spend years

standing one room apart,

believing there will always be more time.

More summers.

More conversations.

More chances to reach for each other.

Until one day

the mirror finally updates.

And all at once

the young man is gone.

The young woman too.

And what remains

is the unbearable realization

that the thing we were protecting ourselves from

was never each other.

It was living.

Together.

Before the years carried us somewhere

we never meant to go.

So look at me again.

Not who I was.

Not who you feared.

Not who you learned to survive.

Look at me as I am.

Because every morning

the face changes a little more.

And one day,

without asking permission,

time will take the mirror from the wall,

Or the face from the reflection.

And neither of us

will care who was right.

Only whether we spent our brief, 

beautiful years

standing across from one another

or finally

I miss the kingdom we built from foolish things.

The little crooked empire

stitched together from smoke,

cheap pizza,

half-finished movies,

and the kind of laughter

that never realized it was becoming a memory.

I miss shower noodles.

Not because they made sense.

Because they didn’t.

Because somewhere between the steam

and the absurdity,

we discovered a language

that belonged to nobody else.

I miss pizza-pasta

and all the ridiculous phrases

that sounded like nonsense to everyone outside the castle walls.

Tiny spells.

Passwords.

Proof that two people

had wandered so far into each other

that even nonsense became sacred.

I miss the way you’d look at me.

Like I had accidentally pulled a star from the sky

when all I had really done

was exist in front of you.

You used to study me

the way travelers study constellations.

Not because they need them.

Because they’re beautiful.

Because they’re curious.

Because they wonder what lives beyond them.

I miss your stories.

The old roads.

The family ghosts.

The childhood victories and wounds

you carried folded in your pockets.

I miss learning the map of you.

Every conversation another lantern lit

inside a house I hadn’t explored yet.

I miss the drives to nowhere.

Windows down.

Music loud enough

to drown out every responsibility

hunting us through the dark.

The road stretching endlessly ahead

like some enchanted ribbon

the world had forgotten to roll up.

Just us.

Sunglasses.

Bad plans.

Good company.

I miss 42 heart attacks.

Planning trips to Vegas.

Sailboats.

The impossible future

we used to construct from clouds.

Not because any of it was certain.

Because we enjoyed imagining it together.

Back when possibility still lived in the room.

Back when tomorrow felt less like a spreadsheet

and more like a treasure map.

I miss the novels.

The endless messages.

Paragraph after paragraph

crossing the distance between us.

I would hide at work

like a thief in an old cathedral.

Stealing sixty seconds.

Maybe thirty.

Just enough time

to see your name appear.

Just enough time

to remember there was a world outside invoices,

outside schedules,

outside groceries and bills.

A world where you still wanted

to tell me things.

I miss seeing into you.

Not the version of you

that manages calendars.

Not the version of you

that takes care of our children.

You.

The hidden machinery.

The impossible architecture.

The strange beautiful gears

that turned beneath your skin.

I miss hearing your thoughts wander.

I miss you talking too much.

I miss the poolside, white wine and broken stools.

Now everything feels edited.

Condensed.

Practical.

Like somebody took an ancient forest

and replaced it with straight roads.

Easier to navigate.

Harder to get lost in.

And maybe that’s what I miss most.

Getting lost.

Not in a place.

In you.

And I miss being intimidating to you.

Not because I wanted power.

Because curiosity still lived there then.

You’d tilt your head

like I was some dangerous creature

sleeping at the edge of the woods.

Something you hadn’t figured out yet.

Something worth approaching carefully.

Something worth approaching at all.

Now I sit alone

inside the ruins of our little kingdom.

The castle still standing.

The banners still hanging.

The fire still burning.

But the magic,

the magic was never in the walls.

It was in the way we’d look at each other

and secretly believe

we had discovered something

I learned your weather

like a sailor studying black water.

When you stormed,

I thundered back.

When you burned,

I lit myself on fire beside you

just to prove I could survive the heat too.

I thought love meant matching damage.

Thought devotion looked like drinking poison together, like some over praised victorian teen romance novel. 

Somewhere in my own performance,

I became a man wearing another face.

A cigarette actor

in a cut-rate play,

reading off lines I didn’t author,

Placing someone else’s grief in my mouth.

And you felt it.

Maybe not consciously.

Maybe only in the quiet after arguments,

when something in you stayed hungry.

Because beneath all my noise

there was always a stillness.

Cold hands on the steering wheel.

Eyes fixed through the windshield at midnight.

A calm so heavy

I mistook it for cruelty.

I thought if I let you see it,

you’d think I never cared at all.

But now I think

that was the honest part of me.

You weren’t looking for fire.

You were looking for somewhere

the fire couldn’t reach.

So I’m done wearing false panic

like makeup on a bruised face.

Done rehearsing tenderness

so nobody mistakes my silence for absence.

I see you.

Even the parts of you

that sharpen themselves in the dark.

The parts that test doors.

The parts that wait for abandonment

before they can breathe.

I’m not afraid of that,

of you…

And I won’t kneel beside your chaos pretending it’s the same as intimacy.

There’s a road in front of me now.

Blacktop swallowing headlights.

Engine humming like a confession.

You can come with me.

But I won’t drag you into the passenger seat,

and I won’t park the car

just because you’re afraid to leave.

Get in.

I study you emotionally.

But I repair clocks.

So I learned long ago

that what keeps a thing alive

is rarely what it says.

Clocks never explain themselves.

They confess in rhythm.

That’s why I listen

for the tick.

Everyone hears the tick.

The obvious movement.

The public face of motion.

Hands sweeping forward

pretending time is healthy

because it is still moving.

But the tok,

the tok tells the truth.

The space after effort.

The answer to the impulse.

The return.

If the tok arrives late,

I know something inside

is dragging its feet through dust,

or a spring is weakening

under pressure it was never meant to hold forever.

Out of beat.

Out of symmetry.

A healthy mechanism

does not hesitate to become itself again.

And if there is no tok at all,

that is worse.

Because sometimes

a clock can still twitch without it.

Still imitate life.

Still jerk its hands forward

on borrowed tension.

But without the tok,

the gears stop speaking to one another.

The teeth no longer trust their neighbors.

Motion becomes isolated.

Disconnected.

And eventually

even the tick gives up

trying to sound convincing.

So when I go quiet,

understand,

I am not studying your words.

I am listening

for the part of you

that answers back

to let your breath become a language

without ever saying my name in it.

You leave fingerprints on the air instead.

Enough warmth to haunt the room,

never enough to stay.

And I think that’s 

the cruelest kind of hunger,

not starvation,

but being fed in careful increments

until longing learns to survive on crumbs.

You make honesty sound reckless,

like a man holding a lit match

inside a house already soaked in gasoline.

You call distance wisdom.

Call restraint maturity.

Call your disappearing “trying to do the right thing.”

And maybe sometimes

you even mean it.

Maybe that’s why it works.

Because when you pull away,

it doesn’t feel calculated.

It feels mournful.

Like you’re abandoning something holy

for its own protection.

But there’s a difference

between guarding a fire

and never letting it burn.

A difference between patience

and standing outside the door forever

with your hand almost reaching for the handle.

You have mastered almost.

Almost honest.

Almost vulnerable.

Almost mine.

And God,

almost can keep a person alive

that left the porch light on.

after the windows,

stopped glowing.

I could still hear us,

moving through the halls

A ghost of laughter,

two tired hearts pretending the cracks,

were only shadows on the wall.

But love never dies.

winter enters floorboards slowly,

teaching warm rooms how to ache.

And I loved you in quiet ways.

While You carried storms, beneath your ribs,

I could never name.

I was trying to stop a flood,

with bare hands.

The cruel thing about love:

Is how it can remain a memory.

while collapsing in your hands.

beneath ruin, beneath dust and fractured vows, I still believe,

we built it beautiful.

Even broken cathedrals,