Lover
Lover
You arrived like a stain of midnight
spilled across a page that had once believed in light.
Not all at once—
not with thunder or declarations—
but as a dark tide gathering in the center of me,
pulling every color toward your gravity.
Around us, the world fractured into petals and bruises,
white blossoms pressed against shadows,
memories breaking apart like paint beneath impatient fingers.
I tried to name what you were.
A storm.
A wound.
A prayer left too long unanswered.
But none of those fit.
Because storms leave.
Wounds heal.
Prayers rise.
You stayed.
You spread through the untouched places,
through the careful spaces I had kept clean and bright,
turning certainty into smoke,
turning silence into ache.
And still, I could not look away.
There were pieces of us everywhere—
splashes of turquoise hope,
streaks of crimson wanting,
the pale ghosts of things we almost said.
They clung to the edges of our darkness
like flowers blooming from burnt earth.
Perhaps that is what love is:
Not the brightness people promise.
Not the perfect white field.
But the beautiful ruin of becoming intertwined—
color sinking into shadow,
shadow learning the shape of color,
until neither can remember where it ends
and the other begins.
So I stand here now,
surrounded by the remnants of who I was,
holding the impossible weight of who we became.
And in the vast dark center of it all,
there is you.
My lover.
The night that swallowed the page—
and somehow
made the painting whole.
