THE MAN UNDERNEATH
THE MAN UNDERNEATH
You held my hand, and suddenly, a door opened inside me,
a door I had circled my whole life, the way you circle a pit
over which I had thrown a rug embroidered with my own name;
I should have asked myself questions, long ago, while it was cheap,
I should have asked who I am beneath everything I was told I was,
who I would have become without the identity others calibrated for me.
Maybe, if I hadn't fallen in love, I would never have found myself,
because those who have never fallen confuse acceptance
with identity, wearing it like a coat tailored by strangers,
becoming whatever the world calls them, whatever family expects, whatever
circumstance allows, whatever society teaches in its gentle voice,
and never pausing long enough to ask if it's truly their own.
But love has a strange way of taking you apart, piece by piece,
like a mad clockmaker who lays your gears out on the table
and walks away, leaving you to learn on your own how time is measured;
you begin to know yourself only when you're forced to search for yourself,
and the search begins exactly at the place where you did not receive
what you had been ready to pay for with everything you had and didn't have.
Broken hope tells you who you are, in its hoarse voice,
the unanswered question tells you, the nights spent trying
to understand why tell you ~ all those nights with your eyes open
like windows in the house of a man who no longer comes home,
and the heart that couldn't have what it wanted becomes a mirror,
a cold, honest mirror, in which you finally see yourself whole.
Maybe that's why we break. Not to be destroyed, but to be drawn
into the light, the way a seed is pulled from its too-tight husk;
because until life cracks something inside us with its rough fingers,
we rarely look inward, we rarely climb down into the cellar
with the trembling candle of our own bewilderment,
to see what has been sitting there, in the dark, waiting patiently.
You don't discover your depths when everything runs smooth, like calm water,
you discover them when the thing you prayed for doesn't come,
when the person you had set down beside you in your mind isn't there,
when the future you built so carefully collapses like a bank of clay ~
and somewhere, beneath all the broken expectations, like beneath a fallen roof,
breathes a version of you that has been waiting, a lifetime, to be found.
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