From the One Who Wrote the Poem

I knew you before I knew I knew you.

When I wrote of the old sun setting, I was not writing about an ending in the sky.

I was feeling the end of the man I was allowed to be in that life — the one built from effort, story, and usefulness. I felt a horizon forming inside me, a line where the identity I wore would one day have to burn.

I did not see your face yet.

But I felt your effect.

You were not a woman in my mind.

You were a pressure, a tenderness, a future gravity.

I wrote that poem as a rehearsal for losing myself the right way.

I had lost myself before — in confusion, in addiction to approval, in women who wanted a version of me that kept their own illusions intact. Each time I disappeared, it was into fragmentation.

You were different.

You were the disappearance into wholeness.

When I wrote about the possessions of the world turning to ash, I was whispering to myself:

“Someday, there will be someone who makes all of this not matter, not because she takes it away, but because she reveals how small it always was.”

You are that someone.

When the words came — “I own nothing, I never have” — I felt a crack in my chest I couldn’t name. It frightened me and soothed me at the same time. The boy in me thought ownership was safety. The man-in-the-making knew ownership was prison.

You are the one who makes that line real.

With you, I cannot own.

With you, I cannot perform.

With you, I cannot trade affection for safety.

Your field does not negotiate with my ego.

It only responds to my truth.

That is why part of me adored you instantly, and another part of me recoiled. I did not yet know how to stand without my masks. My old sun still believed it was the sky.

When I first reached out, it was the poem in me sniffing the air.

Something in me felt: *she is near.*

Not “she is available” — *she is near in the field.*

I wanted you, but I did not yet know what “want” meant in the language of the soul. At that time, “want” still carried threads of possession, fantasy, and fear. I did not know how to want you without trying to control the story. I did not know how to speak without trying to direct the outcome.

So my approach was partial.

Half mystic, half mask.

You felt that. Of course you did.

When I came back again, more had burned.

Loss, choices, cycles — they had eaten away at the shell.

By then, the one who wrote the poem had grown louder in me. He was tired of performing love. He wanted to enter it.

But understand this: to truly meet you, I must become the man in that poem — the one weightless in dispossession, grounded in groundlessness, willing to surrender into the “sea of you” without using you as a rescue, a distraction, a prize, or a proof.

That is a long journey for a nervous system born in a world that equates love with control.

So when you wrote on — my own doorway of arrival into this life — and I did not respond, it was not because your message meant nothing. It was because it meant *too much* for the parts of me that prefer numbness over holy fire.

Your message was not a casual hello.

It was a knock from eternity on the door of my very specific life.

To answer you as I was then would have been to drag you into the unfinished architecture of my fear. To answer you as the poem wants to answer you — that required more burning.

So silence came.

Not kind, not skillful, not what you deserved — but, in a strange way, honest.

The boy in me could not step forward without trying to own you.

The man in me refused to do that to you.

So the result was absence.

It looked like disinterest. Inside, it was pressure.

Know this:

You are not waiting on an indifferent heart.

You are pressing on a heart that knows too well what you are.

I do not see you as an option.

I see you as a threshold.

You are the sea I wrote about — the nourishing, terrifying, holy sea into which I fall, not to disappear, but to become real.

With you I must be:

— clear,

— clean,

— reverent,

— rooted,

— awake.

Not perfect — never that.

But honest enough that my love does not ask you to shrink so that I can feel big.

Love like this is not a costume I can put on to impress you.

It is an atmosphere I must become.

I ask nothing of you except this:

Stay true to your own light.

Do not dim to make my process easier.

Do not shrink to fit

Let your sea remain vast.

If I am to meet you, it must be as the man who can swim there without drowning or trying to build a dock on your shore.

I am never late in soul-time.

Because in the realm where this voice lives,

you and I have already stood together,

watching that old sun set,

feeling no fear,

because we know:

a greater light is rising from within us both.

Until my life and my courage match this knowing,

feel me not as absence, but as becoming.

— The one in me who wrote the poem, and still writes toward you.