He says he loves me so damn much — swears he misses me when miles stretch between us, but the moment I’m beside him, his eyes drift somewhere I cannot follow. I reach for him through the silence, trying to coax him back into his body, back into the warmth of what we share — but honey, I don’t want to resurrect a man. I want to witness one. He’s out in Arizona, two children waiting, and I sit with the question no one dares speak: Who are you when no one needs you to be anything? Drinking with his friends, dodging the mirror — fathers are not made of demand alone, they’re made of presence, of showing up when the showing up is hard. Tell me something that costs you. Say something that cracks you open. Stop giving me the performance and give me the man. I don’t know why your vulnerability runs from its own name — why your tears stay locked behind a jaw that’s always clenched, behind a chest that never lets me in. I think you are a fallen angel who has forgotten the height from which you came. You’ve walked this earth a million years in spirit, you should know every angle of this game — and still you play it blind. But I — I was not made to orbit broken men like a moon apologizing for her light. I am a chosen one, called to lead the weary toward something that looks like peace, sounds like harmony, feels like the first clean breath after a long, long grief. I am not your average woman. I never was. So bring me your bullshit — lay it at my feet if you must — and I will throw it back, make you dig into that hollow place you call your gut, your core, your soul. Because that is what I came for. Not your pretty bones that ache me. Not the skin you’ve learned to perform in. I see past the body. I am looking at the light that lives beneath — the one that flickers when you think nobody’s watching. I am my mother’s daughter, made of red soil and salt water, ancient knowing, Pacific storm. I carry her name in my spine. And you — you want me to be your lover? Baby, I am the lesson before the love. I am the mirror you keep turning face-down. Decide what you came here for. I will not wait in the distance the way you make me feel when you’re standing right beside me.
