When I No Longer Love You

When I love youyou are one of the few exceptions in this lifeWhen I love you no longerwhatever is said is not worth a cent

While I still loveyou are the name chewed over and over late at nightWhen I love no moreI need not hear anything about you

Isn't everyone like thisgoing through confirmation and doubt again and againIsn't everyone like thisoutlasting the long wait and then giving it up

Everyone is only ever like thisturning affection into bargaining chipspassing desire off as reasonand blaming the whole shortfall on you at the end

We too once understood without wordseven our silences could fall into stepback then we actually believed —that understanding was a refugethat likeness could hold off every difference

Only later did I seethat what we called our unspoken accordwas only, in each other,looking for ourselves

Until the filter shattered across the floorand you saw my selfishness and my evasionand I saw your calculation and your hesitation

From the joy of first sight to mutual disgusttakes no longer than waking from a dreamYesterday still held as the only onetoday no longer neededjust the distance of turning around

We are only mortals, that is all

In love we enshrine the other as a godout of love we sentence them to exile in the wastelandmigrating back and forth between extremesand rarely admitting —that what really changedwas not necessarily the other personbut that small place inside oneself,the wavering expectation, the self-interest

How am I to blame you

In this game of binary oppositionyou do not even have full autonomyWe are driven by fearencoded by scarcityand desire has set our default premises

When I held you as something rareperhaps I only needed meaningWhen I said I give upperhaps it was only my pride at work

What we call harmis nothing but two operating systemsin a mistranslation they cannot reconcile

What we call betrayalis nothing but two value modelsin a misalignment that will not run

If one day I speak again of cherishingmay it carry no trace of possession

If one day we each fall to piecesthere is no need to belittle each other

Admit that the brightness and the wreckageare both a track we walked togetherand a lesson brought to completion

Human nature, in this rise and fall,rehearses over and over,and between loving and not lovingtakes itself apart

It is only, inside a relationship,little by little,learning to face things honestly

We are not opposing individualsonly, within the same system,carriers of different versions

When the fixation recedeswhen the roles withdrawyou and Iare nothing but

something in the matrix of cause and effectbriefly lighting up

and then once moredefined