Inescapable•

This is written

From a place of quiet weariness

Where I see clearly

And still do not leave, where something remains

Not because it is easy, but because it will not loosen its hold on me

There are moments when it gathers in my chest

So completely

I could cry from exhaustion

Not because I do not understand

But because I understand, and remain

••••••••

When you grow tired

Understand

That I

Have been standing for some time

Within a quiet depletion

A subtle undoing

That gathers without spectacle

Without witness

Without relief

It accumulates

Not from absence

But from the persistence

Of what remains

From the repeated deferral

Of what has already taken shape

In everything

But admission

In moving alongside something undeniable

While denying its rightful form in preserving composure

While something within me presses with increasing clarity

Against its containment

Against the careful discipline

We impose upon it

I recognize it

In the measured duration of your nearness

In the deliberate incompleteness

Leaving me suspended

As though finality itself

Were a boundary

We are unwilling to cross

As though definition

Would demand more than we are prepared to concede

And yet

What exists does not diminish

It gathers

It consolidates itself

In the spaces you leave unoccupied

In the quiet disarray

Of my interior world

In the gradual yielding of the structures

I once believed sufficient

There is no reprieve in this

No restoration

Only a sustained interior tension

Precise

Unarticulated

And yet entirely present

That neither dissipates

Not resolves into something gentler

It is exacting in its continuity

It endures without permission

Without confirmation

Without the courtesy of resolution

And still

I remain within its influence

Not out of uncertainty

For I

Perceive it with an exactness

That admits no illusion

But because there is within you

A force

I do not readily dismiss

A quiet insistence

That continues to draw me inward

Despite the fatigue it leaves in its wake

It is not softness

It is not yearning alone

It is something more exacting

Something that persists

Even as I grow weary

Of its lack of conclusion

Even as I begin to understand

The cost of its continuation

There are moments

In which I consider departure

Not as escape

But as preservation

And yet even in that consideration

I feel its return

Not as urgency

But as inevitability

And so I persist

Not unaware

Not untouched

Not unaltered

But still unwilling

Or perhaps unable

To withdraw from what continues

To exist between us

With a certainty

That requires nothing

That offers nothing

And yet remains

Unrelinquished

Unresolved

And entirely

Inescapable

To be continued . .