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Young Love

We were not wrong to believe it.

That is the unbearable part.


Romeo leans across the dark

toward something he cannot name

but cannot not reach for —

the way the drowning reach,

the way the dreaming reach. 


We called it love.

It was also other things 

Proof that we existed,

that the self had edges

and someone had agreed to stand at them.


Stendhal was right about crystals.

The mind does that — covers what it wants

in its own light, and makes the beloved


necessary as air 

obvious as gravity.


At nineteen you do not know

At nineteen you do not know


You think it is really true.

And maybe it was.

But the clock was always moving.

over the sound of each other’s breathing.


Now we can hear it.

Now we know what Fromm knew —

that fusion isn’t destiny,

that fever breaks,


that you need a self

to love from.


The garden we grew into

is real. It holds.

It does not ask us to burn.

But the fire lit the world once

in a way the garden cannot,


and we would be lying

if we said we didn’t miss

that version of ourselves

the version 

that still believed one person

could contain everything.


We look back without contempt.

We look back the way you look

at a place you lived in once

and will not enter again —

not because it was wrong

but because that door

can no longer

be yours. 



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