a poem
the boy who went quiet like the sea
once there was a boy
who loved a girl made of starlight,
and she loved an ocean
because the ocean never left
it only pulled back sometimes,
low tide,
and came home again.
he used to say her eyes weren’t sky
or sea,
they were earth
brown,
warm,
the color of ground you could actually stand on,
soft at the edges
like something an angel
had traced too gently
to leave a hard line.
her father was a lighthouse
that stopped shining
before she learned to read its warnings.
she grew up steering by a light
that wasn’t there,
learning the hard way
that some shores
wait for ships
that were never coming back.
and still, somehow,
her face kept its own tide
cheeks that rose full and round
like moons refusing to wane
no matter how dark the water got,
a mouth soft and full,
poured like something
that never hardened
even when it should have,
even when he gave it
every reason to.
the boy did not know this
the night she said
he could not be the lighthouse
her father should have been.
something in him
went out
like a switch,
not a choice
and he did what drowning men do.
he stopped moving.
he stopped speaking.
he let the water close over his head
and called it peace.
he blocked the shore
so the shore
wouldn’t watch him sink.
she screamed his name
from the surface,
but underwater
sound doesn’t arrive as sound.
it arrives as pressure.
as a shape moving through the dark
that used to be a voice.
he couldn’t hear her.
he felt her instead
a vibration against his skin
where his ears had already given up,
the way you feel a storm
before you see it,
the way the deep
still knows
when something above it
is breaking.
so he came back up.
gasping.
sorry.
holding on to her
the way a drowning man
holds on to solid ground
and her eyes were the ground.
brown,
steady,
the only earth
in a life made of tides,
and even wrecked,
even shaking,
her mouth still curved
like it was building
a shore
to forgive him on.
but the girl made of starlight
kept a scar where the lighthouse
used to be,
and now a second one
beside it,
smaller,
shaped like a boy
who went quiet
when she needed noise.
she called it unchosen.
he called it
the only way he knew
to survive loving her
without destroying her too.
both of them were right.
that’s the cruelest kind of story
no villain,
just two people
speaking different languages
made of the same silence.
so now, the boy stands at the edge of the water
and talks to the girl
like she’s still made of stars,
because she is,
and he says:
I used to think I was the tide.
going out.
coming back.
proud of the coming back,
like that was the whole promise.
but a girl who grew up
watching a light disappear
does not need something
that leaves and returns.
she needs something
that never actually goes.
so I am not the tide anymore.
I am the shore itself. I am the ground beneath the water, the part that stays even when the water covers it, even when you can’t see it, even in the dark
still there.
always there.
not almost gone.
not coming back.
just
never left.