Today I whisper into the wind
All of my love for you.
I just need a place to put it.
Feeling all of it living in what it took to make my current self
Is too much now.
Not being able to tell you in a way that serves me too
Is becoming too much now.
I hope my confessions still make their way to you.
You’re not so far away after all.
Far enough and for now that’s a good thing.
I imagine you,
Where you are,
taking today to reflect on all that has changed.
I’m sure you’re confused because you have remained the exact same.
It’s just me and my reaction to you that has morphed.
You don’t understand that my love for you now is just the same as it was.
Only difference now is that
The love I have for myself has grown.
I’m still waiting for the same love
I have grown up squeezing into the seconds you spared for me.
Years were spent searching for the lack in all of the wrong places.
Desperation guided me towards giving the last remaining parts of myself to the hungry.
Bottomless pits never quite having enough to share with me too.
Not even scraps were kicked my way.
Watching lips licked and tummies fill with what I gave was close enough to the feeling I sought out for.
After all I hadn’t been introduced to
the version of love I mindlessly gave others.
You taught me that that was what love was supposed to feel like.
Isn’t it sad that when I finally give you a beginner’s manual on how to show me love
You take it as disrespect and tell me to grow up?
For I have been growing and grown since the moment our bond sealed my intergenerational fate in the delivery room.
There was a whole hour where I didn’t know anyone else but you.
That is when you became my whole world.
You became my whole world
And I became your empty vessel,
A receptacle for all your unspoken fears,
A patch for all your unseen wounds,
A mirror reflecting the fragments of your soul.
I poured my love into the cracks,
Hoping it would make you whole.
I gave and gave until I was hollow,
A shell of myself, echoing with your needs.
My heart, a bottomless well,
Always there to quench your thirst,
But never filled in return.
I’ve learned now what love truly means,
It’s more than sacrifice without end.
It’s a mutual exchange, a dance,
A balance that we could never find.
You took my love to fill the voids,
To mend the holes left by your own past.
But now I see, clear as day,
That love isn’t just about giving,
It’s also about receiving as well.
I loved you with all I had,
But it wasn’t enough to fix what was broken.
You used me to fill your emptiness,
And left me with nothing but the fragments of myself.
I didn’t even get the chance to untangle my identity from yours.
So here’s my final whisper to the wind,
A declaration of my self-love regained.
I gave you all the love I had,
And now I keep the rest for me.
No longer will I be the glue for your pieces,
I am whole on my own, finally free.
-KN