The Pause Before The Play
You asked me to love myself more,
make a little room inside my heart for you.
I cried for an hour straight,
realizing I never learned
how to take up space,
how to stand in my own light
without flinching from the glow.
My fear of being rejected
teaches me to reject the calm,
to turn away from peace
when love comes close,
like I’m bracing for a collision
on an endless neon highway.
I’m scared that when you see me,
you’ll change your mind and fade away.
No one ever climbed my walls
to show me beauty in my flaws,
no one ever stayed long enough
to see the signal beneath the static,
the pulse under the noise.
But you see me now,
and I can’t go back to darkness.
You remake me in your quiet way,
and I won’t survive the empty world
without the light you bring,
the truth you give,
the safety in your arms.
Everyone leaves,
so stay with me
in this twilight realm,
this breath held
before the night rewrites us.
I want to belong to something more,
I want to belong inside your world.
I’ve been trapped in old self-pity,
thinking I don’t look like
what they call pretty,
thinking I’m a glitch
in someone else’s dream,
a ghost in the circuitry.
But you see what I am,
not everything I lack.
And it terrifies me
because I’ve never had that—
something new,
something kind,
something that doesn’t vanish
when the sun rises over the grid.
I never wanted anyone else,
never cared for strangers’ lines.
Men with cologne and clever smiles
made me feel like a novelty,
a joke they’d tell later
in locker rooms and shadows,
a story meant to sting.
But you don’t laugh at me.
You don’t trick me.
You just offer yourself,
your life, your steadiness,
the safety I can only find
in your arms,
the place where the world
finally stops hurting,
where the neon softens
and the night exhales.
And I will let you touch me
in the places no one knows,
the quiet voids carved by cruelty,
the hollows I learned to hide.
If you stay, I’ll stay too.
If you stay, I’ll let myself be seen,
let the walls flicker and fall
like old holograms.
Because you see me now,
and I can’t return to darkness.
You remake me in your quiet way,
and I won’t survive the empty world
without the light you bring,
the truth you give,
the safety in your arms.
Everyone leaves,
so stay with me
in this twilight realm,
the pause before the play begins,
the moment the neon hum
turns into something holy.
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