I Can Carry Fire

I have known you through the turning of seasons,

through the thick air of change and the thin light of distance.

You are both constant and gone,

a pattern I’ve memorized but never claimed.

You tell me you forget things..

but I know the difference between what slips away

and what’s chosen not to be carried.

Memory is an act of will.

Yours bends around what frightens you most:

your own depth.

So I stay still.

I’ve learned how to love without trespass.

To let your silences stand

without filling them with my ache.

To remain near enough for warmth,

but far enough to keep my edges intact.

I do not wait.

I inhabit.

I exist in the space where wanting

doesn’t turn to begging.

Where patience is not passivity

but muscle..

fibers built from restraint and grace.

There are moments you reach,

and I can feel the tremor of honesty

before you retreat behind reason.

You blame the moods, the noise,

the split of your mind that won’t rest.

But I’ve studied more than the symptoms.

I know the scent of fear

when it hides behind logic.

And still...

I meet you with the same quiet strength,

not as savior,

not as sacrifice,

but as one who understands the fire

and refuses to feed it.

Temperance is my inheritance.

It is the choice to hold warmth

without demanding flame.

To stay open

and unconsumed.

Sometimes I wonder

what it is to love someone

who fears the mirror you become.

But I do not push.

I have learned

that love cannot be forced into clarity;

it must find its own reflection.

So I let it.

I let the days roll over us

like water over stone,

and I keep my footing..

smooth now,

not from weakness,

but from weathering.

You call what we have

companionship, comfort, the safe thing.

I call it truth in fragments.

And still, I tend it.

Not as a flame to rekindle,

but as an ember that hums quietly,

teaching me that devotion

is not measured in closeness

but in how gently one can hold distance.

I do not linger.

I remain.

There’s a difference.

My love is not waiting for its reward.

It is tempered like

steel that bends but will not break,

fire refined into calm.

And if you ever look for me

and find me silent,

know it is not absence.

It is the language of someone

who has learned to love deeply

without losing herself

to the noise of it.