The Fool on the Hill
- The Autistic Lens
- Sep 18
- 2 min read
Some stories don’t end in triumph.
Some don’t end in reconciliation.
Some just end in silence, and the decision to stop carrying someone else’s weight.
This is one of those stories.
For fifteen years, I loved someone.
Not passively, not distantly. Romantically, fiercely, foolishly at times. He was the first man I ever had feelings for, and I believed, again and again, that if I just held on long enough — if I carried both of us long enough — he’d find his way back to the boy I once knew.
The boy with ink-stained fingers.
The boy with galaxies in his chest.
The boy who tried.
But love can’t wake someone who refuses to see themselves.
It can’t pierce walls built from deflection and ego.
It can’t turn a monologue into a conversation.
This trilogy of poems — If You Still Remember, If the Hill Grows Quiet, and If the Boy Never Returns — is my attempt to name that grief. To mark the hill I climbed too many times. To honor the love that was real, even if it was never enough.
It’s also a way of saying a kind of farewell.
Not a vindictive one.
Not a cruel one.
But the kind that comes when you realize you can’t save someone from themselves. That the most loving thing you can do — for them, and for yourself — is let go.
So here they are, in order:
They belong together, but each one carries its own heartbeat.
If you read them, thank you for witnessing.
If you see yourself in them, I hope you choose to stop climbing before you break yourself on someone else’s silence.
I still believe in love without transaction.
In truth without reward.
In galaxies that burn for someone who won’t look away.
But I no longer believe he’s coming back.
And to you, the boy on the hill — if you read this, I want you to know it wasn’t written in anger. It was written in heartbreak. The quiet kind that settles in over years, when someone you love keeps drifting just out of reach. I’m not trying to hurt you. I’m not trying to win. This is just the only way I know how to say what I couldn’t get you to hear — the only way I know how to grieve someone who never truly left, but never really stayed. Every word here is mine. No one helped me write this. And if it sounds like a goodbye, like the door is closed forever, it’s not. Not fully. It’s just me choosing to stop climbing. To stop bleeding for silence. You don’t have to respond. You don’t even have to agree. But I hope — for once — you let it sink in.
Afterword:
The title comes from the Beatles’ The Fool on the Hill. In the song, the fool is cast as someone apart, watching the world spin, believing himself to see what others cannot. But here, the meaning flips. This fool isn’t wise, only unreachable — circling mirrors, mistaking distance for insight, and performance for depth. In the end, he is not just the fool, but fooling himself.
