“MINE”

I used to think the strangest part of meeting you was how little of myself I had to translate.

You echoed me so precisely it felt like a cosmic misfile, two people built from neighboring atoms accidentally placed in the same room. I thought that was what people meant by once in a lifetime.

I don’t know how much of it was real anymore.

That sentence still bruises something inside me.

There are memories I can’t enter now without checking the shadows for prior occupants.

Did you love that song, or did you rehearse it like a script?

Did you care about the odd little obsessions we circled for hours, or did you simply learn that enthusiasm was the quickest way into me?

A me too becomes a tactic.

A coincidence grows fingerprints.

The past stays still, but its meaning mutates.

For a long time I thought the worst part was losing you.

Then I thought it was losing us.

Then I wondered whether there had ever been an us to lose.

That one nearly took the floor out from under me.

Because I had loved the sameness.

I had loved being recognized without having to justify my shape.

I had loved pointing to some obscure corner of myself and hearing you say, I know, I have one of those too.

And then, somewhere in the wreckage, a small, impolite thought arrived.

What if those things weren’t beautiful because you shared them with me?

What if I loved finding them in you because I had already loved them in myself, quietly, long before I knew that was what I was doing?

Maybe you weren’t proof those parts of me were worth keeping.

Maybe my delight was the proof.

Maybe I had mistaken reflection for permission.

I think about the hospital sometimes.

You came almost every day.

I remember the embarrassing relief of seeing you walk through the door, someone choosing fluorescent lights and terrible chairs because I was there. I thought, this is what care looks like.

Later I learned you were also campaigning.

Another quarter in the machine.

Another try at the prize behind the glass.

It humiliated me, realizing tenderness can be a strategy wearing soft clothes.

That I had been wanted more than I had been loved.

A possession with a pulse.

I hated that word.

Until I started thinking about prizes.

About claw machines with weak grips and smudged glass, where everyone knows the game is rigged but someone keeps feeding it anyway because there is one thing inside they have decided they want.

Again and again and again.

Wanting is not loving.

I know that now.

But people don’t keep feeding the machine for prizes they don’t care about.

I had spent so long resenting being treated like something to win that I never stopped to consider what it meant that I had been worth trying so hard to win in the first place.

Maybe I was a prize.

I had just been pronouncing it like an insult.

Maybe the humiliation wasn’t being wanted.

Maybe it was that someone could work so hard to have me and then behave as though having me made me ordinary.

There were smaller betrayals.

Those cut deeper.

You used to put my phone on the charger after I fell asleep.

I loved that, its quiet practicality, its imagined tenderness.

Then I learned you had been going through it.

The charger didn’t change.

But the meaning left the room.

It is terrifying how an object can keep its shape after the truth has gutted it.

Recently I was lying with someone new.

I unlocked my phone in front of them without thinking, no shielding, no angle, no instinct to hide.

The moment passed before I realized what I had done.

By every reasonable prediction, I should have become harder to enter.

I should have built walls.

Instead, I seem to have become a person with fewer secret rooms.

Not because everyone is entitled to enter.

They aren’t.

But because there is less in me that requires darkness.

You went looking for secrets.

Somehow I came away needing fewer of them.

I don’t know what to do with that except call it mine.

I used to think you would love me forever.

Not hoped.

Thought.

Your intensity made forever feel less like romance and more like weather.

I have always been afraid of endings.

I have spent my life searching for exemptions, houses that stay, people who stay, loves so enormous that time decides not to touch them.

You felt like that for a while.

Like a loophole.

And then you ended.

Not died.

Just became someone who could leave.

For a long time I thought this proved my oldest fear: everything ends, nothing is safe, do not get comfortable inside anything you cannot keep.

I believed that so completely I almost missed the other possibility.

Maybe endings don’t make things meaningless.

Maybe the possibility of ending is what makes them matter.

I keep thinking about blades, how you sharpen them by taking something away.

I used to think forever meant you could keep repairing indefinitely.

Now I wonder if forever can make us careless with the days inside it.

If we believe there will always be another tomorrow, maybe we stop noticing the one already in our hands.

I am still afraid of endings.

But I no longer need something to be endless before I let it be beautiful.

There are things I thought you gave me that I have had to reclaim.

I used to say you made me better.

You were good at pointing to fractures and then disappearing before anyone had to decide what repairing them required.

Here, you would say.

Here is the problem.

And I would take it home.

I sanded.

I cut.

I rebuilt.

I apologized.

I learned.

For years I thought you had done that for me.

Then I realized something embarrassingly obvious.

You weren’t holding the tools.

I was.

You didn’t invent the part of me that stays up late trying to understand himself.

You didn’t manufacture the conscience that kept asking whether I could do better.

You were simply standing close enough to the construction site to appear in the photograph.

I built this.

Maybe some of it wasn’t even repair.

Maybe I was simply becoming.

That possibility is strangely difficult.

It means some of the things I thought I owed you were never debts at all.

And then there is the part I still struggle to say without sounding unhinged:

How hard I fought.

Jesus Christ.

I fought for you.

I fought when I was tired.

I fought when fighting made me smaller.

I fought after the battle had moved somewhere I could no longer reach it.

I bent so far backward that sometimes I think the only reason I didn’t break was that some stubborn part of me had already decided I would not leave what I loved behind on that field.

I was carrying it out with me or I was not coming home.

I used to look back at that version of myself with embarrassment.

Why didn’t you stop?

Why did you keep going?

Then one day I looked at him accurately.

Who does that?

Who walks onto a battlefield already bleeding and still asks where the people he loves are?

Who looks at the possibility of losing everything and says, fine, but I am not leaving them here alone?

I had been staring so hard at the wounds that I forgot there was a warrior inside them.

I am fiercely loyal.

Not conveniently loyal.

Not loyal because I expect to win.

Loyal in the way that makes statues after death.

I lost.

But loss has never been what makes a champion.

History remembers who kept standing.

Maybe I will stay home more often now.

Maybe I will tend the garden.

But if someone I love ever calls my name from the smoke, I know exactly who is coming.

And I like him.

That may be the strangest thing this wreckage gave me, though maybe I found it there, which is different.

I used to think there was simply more wrong with me than with other people.

More feeling.

More intensity.

More reaction.

More need.

More work.

I envied people who seemed easier to love.

I still think I am more work than some of them.

That sentence no longer scares me.

Because one morning I realized the arithmetic had been dishonest.

More does not only travel in one direction.

I feel more pain.

I also notice more beauty.

I need more honesty.

I also give more of it.

I attach deeply enough to be devastated.

I also love deeply enough to make devotion feel physical.

I am harder to carry than some people.

I also arrive carrying more.

Maybe I was never the bargain version.

Maybe that was the problem.

There are easier loves than mine.

People who ask less.

People who don’t shake the walls.

People who leave fewer fingerprints.

I am not one of them.

I used to think that was something to apologize for.

Now I think I simply misunderstood the price of admission.

The strangest part is that I thought learning the truth about you would make my life uglier.

Sometimes it has.

Some memories I wish I could put back the way they were.

Some tenderness I would give anything to believe in again.

But I have been walking through this collapsed house for a while now, and I keep finding things in the rubble that I thought belonged to you.

My strange little interests.

Mine.

My openness.

Mine.

My growth.

Mine.

My willingness to be known.

Mine.

My capacity to fight.

Mine.

The tenderness I thought you brought out of me.

Mine.

The enormity of the love itself.

Mine.

I thought the worst thing I could discover was that so much of you had not been real.

I didn’t understand that the same discovery might show me how much of me was.

I thought I found something extraordinary because I found you.

Maybe I found you because I was already carrying extraordinary things and recognized their shape wherever I thought I saw them.

Maybe someone else out there is built from neighboring material.

Maybe not.

For the first time, I don’t think I need them to be.

A mirror was never what made the reflection beautiful.

And if I was the one bringing so much of the light into the room, then losing the room does not mean the light went with it.

It only means I know where it lives now.

There will never be another love like mine.

I used to think that sentence was about you.

I don’t anymore.