The Dream Where We Still Try

Where we survive only in the spaces between mercy and delusion.

I’ll never be good enough for you-
perhaps that’s why I keep us in half-dreams,
between borrowed sentences,
beneath lidded eyes and gentle lies.
There, I can still reach for you
without watching you flinch.

In the quiet, I kiss you like an apology.
I picture our foreheads pressed together in the rain,
as if the sky itself were sinking with us,
as if love were a lifeboat
and only one of us could survive the weight of it.
I kiss your head goodbye,
again and again,
like repetition might rewrite the ending.

I wish I could have loved you properly-
in this life, with these hands,
without trembling beneath the weight of wanting.
But I am not strong enough
to bear both your need and my own.
I am not kind enough
to keep pretending I could.

So I’ll reject the thought of us,
not out of cruelty,
but out of mercy-
because I know what it means
to love someone you can never meet halfway.

And maybe, somewhere,
in the dream where we still try,
you’ll look at me
and understand:
I left not because I stopped loving you,
but because you never learned
how to stay.

-Koii