“No, It Wasn’t About Him” (a surreal elegy for an ache that had no name)

 “No, It Wasn’t About Him”

(a surreal elegy for an ache that had no name)

There was a question folded inside the way he looked at me—

“you’re married, right?”

as if the ring I wore on my nerves

was a doorbell he wouldn’t dare press.

But by then the marriage had already become

a house where the walls leaned in to whisper,

a silence with architecture,

a man who mistook my hunger for a light switch

and flicked me off each night before bed.  

No, it wasn’t about him.

Not the boy with smoke in his eyes

and thunder still learning its name.

He was just the mirror I passed by

on my way to undress my loneliness.  

Because the ache didn’t begin with a gaze.

It began when I was still inside love

and still unseen.

It began with dinners served like punctuation,

with a child’s laughter leaking through the seams,

with me, folding my fire into origami

and offering it to a man

who only collected ice sculptures.

So when the crush came,

he was not the fire—

he was just the spark

that showed me how cold I had become.

I did not leave for him.

I left for the woman who kept pressing her ear

against the door of her own silence,

waiting for the knock

that never came.

And even now—

even now—

when my body remembers

what it means to ache without apology,

I know:  

This is not about him.

This is about the hunger

that taught me how to pray

before I even knew the name of god.