When Love Becomes a Lie

I’m done asking love to wear a human face.
When you come for me,
come as her�"
no allegory, no borrowed skin,
no gentle illness, no accident
that whispers explanations.
Just death,
feminine and final,
her hand cold enough to be honest.

Let her touch my cheek the way she never did,
and let my soul step out while these ribs turn to dust.

I’ll scatter that dust toward the girl who taught me
how to fold a promise into a lie,
how to slip it back into my pocket like loose change.
Every time I believed her,
she practiced leaving.
Every time I offered an unguarded heart,
she took notes on where to strike.

So keep her alive.
Let her breathe past my name,
past my grave,
past the age when apologies sound like they mean anything.
Let her marry the sunrise,
again and again,
watch each lover’s hair silver,
watch hospitals take them one by one
while she lays flowers she doesn’t have to buy.
Let her learn the arithmetic of loss:
everyone, everyone, everyone�"
minus her.

And when I’m born again,
give me the memory of her mouth,
the exact way she said forever
while buttoning another man’s shirt.
I’ll find her in that next life,
and the one after,
a quiet man with a familiar ache,
reminding her why grief sits at her table every evening.
Not to punish�"
but to make the suffering legible.

She wanted love without cost;
she’ll get love as cost.
I want death without disguise;
she’ll give it to me plain.
We’ll both have what we asked for:
her, endless mornings; me, an honest hand;
her, the question she buried under all those cheerful lies�"
why does it hurt�"
and me, finally permitted to answer.

But let even eternity tire.
I watch her from whatever threshold I’m allowed,
and I can’t stand the script I wrote her:
centuries of outliving,
of holding photos that go sepia
without her aging beside them.
She never asked for this curriculum in grief,
and I�"I find I don’t want an A+ student.

So let her finally understand�"
the night she counts the cost of all those small betrayals�"and let death come this time
in my coat, my voice,
the way I used to pause before saying her name.
Let me take her hand and call it mercy,
let us be born again at the same moment:
she with memory intact,
me blank as rain.
If she’s learned anything,
she’ll track me down in that fresh life,
flirt with the stranger she made,
win him the way she couldn’t
when she had him.
Let her earn the falling.

But I don’t believe in refunds.
Trust, once spent, doesn’t grow back on the branch.
So let death take flesh before we do�"a woman
who meets me in that next life first,
who tells better jokes,
who knows how to keep her word.
Let her make me love her.
And let the girl stand on the sidewalk of a life she rebuilt,
watching me walk into a house she’ll never enter,
grieving a love she only recognized
after she helped wreck it.

No one breaks even.
Someone always pays in full.
She rents the apartment next to ours because the city is big
but guilt is not.
Through thin walls she hears us�"
me and the woman who was never metaphysical,
who loved me without footnotes�"
raising a kid,
arguing about curtains,
learning each other’s silences.
Three of us grow older in the same zip code:
two of them happy enough,
one of them measuring sunrise
by how much it adds to her regret.

She asks death for herself politely at first,
then rudely,
but death isn’t taking requests while the other two are still alive.
So she watches me age in real time,
watches love look ordinary,
watches it hold up.
She’s there the day I don’t wake up�"
not dramatic, just finished�"and she’s there for the woman
who buries me and then, years later, joins me in wood and earth.

Two graves side by side,
no statue, just names and a date
that overlaps.
She brings no flowers; she brings her whole chest, hollowed out.
She sees what a loved death looks like:
tended, spoken to, warmed by a hand that misses its match.
She finally learns the difference
between being left
and being mourned.

She dies at their feet,
not in poetry but in physiology�"
heart quits, body folds,
brain stops making excuses.
The ground gets one more body,
not as a participant in their love,
just as evidence that some lessons
arrive after the test is over.