the hardest part, loving you.

The hardest part of losing you was not the letting go but the guilt that drives the desperate need to stay. It was knowing that I was not enough to deliver you from darkness. It was realizing that my love was not stronger than your fingers as they clung to darkness and called it kin. I watched life spin around us. Months wither, roses once in bloom that die gracefully then press into the dry pages of my journal— unpruned leaves I cannot grow.

I am alone at the crossroads of your life now, watching you run through circular routes that only lead you back to me.

If this love, this great love, is not enough to deliver you from you, what am I to do?

When the shape of you is jagged, it is I who feel those edges. Yours is the shoulder on my chest that bleeds out onto your scalp as it lays against me with one hand on an open door. Where is the smoothened skin that our love has softened? The kind that was once pliable? The tender form that wraps itself around my waist as we fall asleep? Leaving me will not make you love more, and leaving you will not make me hurt less.

If my love cannot offer you salvation you know you need but still refuse, than I am but the rain. Beating down on a mountain that resents the storm.

-JR