She fed me
before I knew hunger had a name.
The room stayed where it was.
A body beside mine.
Night after night.
I thought that meant stay.
Ink.
Keys.
The habit of tomorrow.
A smaller version in my arms…
time tipped, fell forwards.
Now a small shadow
checks the door for me,
refusing to sleep
until the house is whole.
I used one word for all of it.
It shattered
when the first stopped happening.
I have been careful ever since.
I trust no one.
Love…
we have agreements, not safety.
Child, maybe.
But each year
they acquire a future
that does not include me.
The bond adjusts.
Mine tightens.
Beloved…
approach marked,
fragile cargo.
I keep my circle
deliberately small.
A few genuine friends.
That word…
matters.
Everyone else stays
outside the perimeter.
I give my openness instead
to things that do not leave:
history, ideas,
the long memory of science,
poetry,
the world itself.
These do not die suddenly.
They do not choose differently.
They do not wake one morning
and become someone else.
After eighteen
I stopped mistaking proximity
for permanence.
I learned what bonds are
slowly,
the way you learn a language
after it has already betrayed you.
Some are there before you arrive.
They fasten you to a body,
a name,
a duty you did not consent to.
They hold because they must,
not because they are kind.
You can live inside them for years
and still not be safe.
Some arrive like weather.
They flood the nervous system,
write expectation directly into the blood.
They feel like truth
because they are loud.
They teach hunger, urgency, devotion…
not how to survive the ordinary days
after the fire goes out.
Some are built deliberately,
clause by clause,
promise by promise.
They endure through upkeep,
through repetition,
through what is owed.
They can last a long time
while taking more than they return,
teaching you to call survival
commitment,
and silence
cooperation.
Some exist only while attended to.
They are light,
precise,
easily lost.
They do not survive neglect.
They leave without explanation,
without choosing sides,
and teach you to hold fewer things
more carefully.
None of these are interchangeable.
None deserve the same name.
All of them leave marks.
But the word we have been given
is lazy, insufficient, destructive:
“Love.”
It pretends
that one name can cover
a universe of forms,
and in doing so
it blinds us, misguides us, destroys us.
Bonds are what remain
when words fail.
Bonds are what can be measured
by consequences,
by endurance,
by absence,
by choice.
Bonds are what persist,
and what collapse,
and what return, altered,
and what cannot be confused again.
— UpsilonA
Wow! I was totally drawn in - Beautiful and Powerful!