January 28th, 2002

He came to me with eyes of glass—

polished and clear,

reflecting not my messy edges,

but a landscape of grace,

a gentle and endless sea.

I was a girl of jagged thoughts,

a house built of splinters,

braced for the storm that never came.

You were the quietest arrival,

the sun slipping through the window,

not with fire, but with warmth,

softening the dust in every corner.

My old story was a hunger.

I searched for belonging in loud rooms,

in sharp words,

in the places that promised something

but only left me emptier.

Then you showed me a new language—

a tender touch, a listening ear,

a stillness that settled

the frantic rhythm of my heart.

You did not try to fix my broken parts.

Instead, you watered the garden

I didn't know I had.

You found the fragile seeds of myself,

the small, terrified things,

and held them to the light.

In your gaze, I was not a project,

but a poem,

unfinished and worth reading.

This was how my life began.

Before the passion in my heart could ignite, there was the raw, immediate heat of your desire. It was a hunger I had known before, but never so gentle. It wasn’t a greedy snatching, but a quiet, all-consuming gaze that promised to devour me whole. I was used to being seen as an object, a fleeting pleasure, and in your eyes, I braced for the familiar, inevitable end. But you moved with a reverence that was new to me, a slow, deliberate touch that felt more like a prayer than a demand. You explored me as if I were a sacred text, each line, each curve, a revelation.

And in the quiet moments after, my mind would whisper its cruelest doubts. It would show me ghosts of every boy who had promised to stay and then left. It would tell me this was just another appetite, a temporary kindness before the true, familiar hunger revealed itself. My heart, so desperate and fragile, would seize with the fear of failure, of having been so wrong about a love I had staked my whole self on. The shame of that potential fall was a ghost I carried, a quiet ache that would surface in the dead of night. Yet, beneath the fear, there was an unwavering faith, a small, stubborn ember that refused to be extinguished. It was a belief in the tenderness I had seen in your eyes, a hope that this time, it was real. This time, I was not just a passing meal, but a home you had been searching for.

The quiet cracks began to show, fissures in the polished glass of your eyes. I saw then what I had feared all along—that my love, so boundless and complete, was something you never asked for, something you did not know how to hold. It became a weight, a heavy cloak I draped over you with every confession, every desperate plea for reassurance. Your tenderness, once a refuge, now felt like a debt you resented, a kindness offered only to be taken away. I wanted to confess everything: how you had remade my world, how the girl I was before you felt like a myth, how my heart was a garden you had planted and now threatened to abandon.

But the words would die on my tongue. The unspoken truth was a wound, an endless, aching pain. My endless pain was the first moment of betrayal, not from you, but from a love I thought was pure. In your gaze, my love became a burden, a tangled mess of need and dependency you could not stomach. I was no longer a poem you wanted to read, but a chapter you wanted to skip. And in that silence, I understood the cruelest lesson of all: a love given freely is not always a love received.

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