What We Were, Are, and Always Will Be

I mourn who I was before your touch—
a careful soul who walked through life alone,
who thought they needed nothing, no one, much,
whose heart had calcified to stubborn stone.
That person is gone now, lost to you, to us, to this—
the way you broke me open with your hands,
the revolution of your kiss,
the self I shed like snow on warming lands.

I grieve the distance that once lived between
two strangers passing on a crowded street,
the thousand nights we might have never been,
the lives we walked before our paths met again.

What sorrow lives in all we could have missed—
the mornings waking separate and cold,
lips that may have never known bliss,
the stories that would die without being told.

But eulogies are not for death alone;
they sing of transformation, they sing of letting go—
I lay to rest the parts I've outgrown
to make room for the love we've come to know.

So here I stand, undone and remade whole,
mourning who I was with grateful tears,
for you have touched the deepest part of my soul
and banished my solitary years.

The person who was guarded now lies still,
replaced by one who trembles at the sound of your voice,
who flowers like an orchid in Spring,
who burns but is not sorry for the flame.

I eulogize my loneliness tonight,
that faithful friend who kept me cold and safe—
you are the love that carved me into better shape.
And though we breathe and hold each other near,
I mourn what's lost without regret or fear.

For love requires a kind of dying, too—
the death of "I" to make a room for "we,"
and I have never mourned a truer truth:
that losing myself in you has set me free.

Vitruvian Love – a study of the ideal proportions
of love as a microcosm of the universe.