Before her,
I was a map.
All the roads
led to dead ends.
Every turn was a risk.
A performance
of confidence.
I wore armor
I didn't forge,
carried a sword
I couldn't swing.
I was living
the wrong story.
A character
in a role
he never chose.
She looked at me
not as a project
but as a puzzle,
with a perfect solution.
She didn't tell me
what to be.
She just said
it was okay to be.
My silence, she said,
was not empty.
It was full
of things I was learning.
She found the light
in the shadows where I hid.
She took my broken parts
and held them
up to the sun.
They began to shimmer,
a mosaic.
And I finally began to breathe.
Not just air,
but the world.
I was never a man worth having
until she gave me
the space to be myself.
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