Loving Her Had Done Something to Me

The first tear surprised me.
It slid down my face before I gave it permission.
I wasn’t even sure who it belonged to.
A man or a ghost of one.

I stood between the trunks,
trying to breathe through a throat that never learned how to speak for itself.
Loving her had done something to me.
It pulled sound out of my chest,
but nothing ever reached my mouth.
I kept swallowing whole storms,
hoping she could read weather I never named.

Every time she asked what I felt,
my voice stalled.
My ribs tightened like they guarded a locked room.
She wanted words.
I wanted to give them.
My body refused.
It always refused.

So I came here.
Into the woods where no one expected language.
No one asked me to explain why my hands shook
when I thought about how much I loved her
and how little of that love ever escaped me.

The air felt cold enough to tell the truth.
My knees hit the ground before I could stop them.
I pressed my forehead to the dirt.
The smell of soil hit something deep.
Something that remembered being young
and quiet
and punished for sound.

The tears turned fast and messy.
Heavy streams that made my chest burn.
I had never cried like that for anyone.
I didn’t know if I cried because I loved her
or because love exposed how voiceless I was.

The trees took all of it.
They didn’t shift when I admitted that I kept losing her
in the silence I carried like armor.

I slammed my fists against the ground.
A root split skin on my palm.
It helped.
The sting cut through the confusion.
A reminder that pain could be honest.
A reminder that my voice had lived in my body
even when my mouth stayed still.

I stayed there until my vision blurred into raw shapes.
Until the cold climbed my spine.
Until I felt emptied enough to stand again.

When I finally lifted my head,
my face streaked and swollen,
the forest held me without question.

I walked out knowing love can break a man easiest
in the places where his voice never grew.