I heard your knock at the door.
I’d been waiting for you in the shadows, in the dusky, silent shadows.
Chin on my knees, arms round my legs, and I waited.
Hooded eyes, thinking of you;
Thinking of what you were bringing striding up the path, alive with hope.
I shifted; a moment; a tense, hanging, weighted moment;
The pause before the pendulum swung again.
My heart was on a string anchored in the core of the earth,
Waiting to be snapped as I rose up to open the door.
A silent twinge in the darkness; a slither of moonlight puddling on the floor, calling, calling, calling.
And I waited.

Borrowed moments ran through my mind;
Of happy tears and smiles and joys shared and cherished;
Of sunlight and moonlight mixed in the cup that we sipped and we gulped from with pleasure;
Glimpses of future with their memories past that dictated the story that we lovers would share.

And I waited.

And there! At the gate, with a rising and falling
Of my chest weighted down through the core –
A breathless snow flurry of hope-wisps mixed richly
Through the dusky, silent hall.
Your dancing stride moved up the path
With those tenacious hopes living and growing by seconds,
And your meaningful sounds of potential glowing.

And I waited.

I heard you, pushing thresholds of delight and expectancy,
Streaming in through the glass in the door,
Pearling and swirling with the moonbeams and soft glows of purposeful meaningful tendrils.

And you knocked.

My heart was almost already out there with you,
Enveloping you with my joy and my fears pushed down by my excitement.

I stopped waiting.

I rose heavily from the shadows as though the dusky velvets were ropes,
With my heart already dancing outside with your footsteps.
My leaden fingers fumbled with the door handle that would open to my future with you.
Thick as the mineshaft’s sooty air, the tension hung deep and rippling.

I pulled open the door in my treacle-thick dreaming
And saw your head turn towards me with sudden delight
Breaking over your features as the golden rays of the sun seep over the horizon at dawn.

You smiled.

A dazzling, dew-laden, joyful smile; you flung your delight of me into my face
And you held open your welcoming arms to me, waiting, waiting, waiting
For my steps to fling me into your embrace,
Breaking that string from the earth’s core to my heart so that I would be fully yours.

And I stood.

Looking at you.

I stared into the depths of your now-clouding eyes and I whispered,

“I’m sorry”.

And you dropped your arms, because you knew.
You had hoped.
But you knew.

And I closed the door, and you gently, gently, gently moved away into the comforting arms of the moon.

It was not the earth that held my heart anchored.
It was my heart that clung to the deep of the core,
To the heavy, the hidden, the forgotten terrors,
The unreachable, frightening monsters of the past.

Should I have walked into your arms,
I would have destroyed us both.
For love pierces darkness like a spear of light
And lays bare the ugly, crawling demons of destruction.

And I could not bear for you to look at me in the light, for then you would have seen what I truly was:
Soulless, fruitless, empty.

I cannot give what I don’t have.