The Silence That Follows

I need to share something difficult — not for advice, not for comfort, but because sometimes grief needs a shape outside the body, and if I don’t give it one it will keep living in my ribs like a trapped animal. For those who’ve known me a long time, you know who this is about without me saying it. The old story. The one that became a quiet landmark in the geography of my life. The relationship that ended and never really ended, because the ending didn’t come with an explanation — it came with a wound I carried forward like a wet coat across the chest, heavy, clinging, always there even when I pretended it wasn’t.

Nearly twenty years ago, I was with someone for years. Not a fling. Not a chapter you skim and forget. A real portion of my life. A formative one. The kind of relationship that doesn’t just give you memories — it gives you blueprints. She taught me what devotion felt like when it was alive and electric. She taught me how art can be a language for things the mouth can’t hold. She taught me how to look at the world like it mattered — like light and shadow were not just physics, but meaning. And whether she meant to or not, her fingerprints ended up on everything I became after: my writing, my music, my photography, the entire way I translate feeling into something you can touch.

And here is the part I rarely say out loud, because saying it out loud makes it real in a way that is both honest and humiliating: I never stopped loving her. Not in the “I want you back” way. Not in the “I’m stuck in the past” way. In the quiet, permanent way you love someone who helped shape you when you were still soft. In the way you love a person who became part of your internal weather. In the way you love someone even after life splits into separate timelines and you build other homes and other futures. Love doesn’t always evaporate just because you obey reality. Sometimes it just… becomes an ache you learn to live around.

For almost twenty years, I carried a specific belief like a splinter under the skin: that it ended because of me. That I ruined it. That I wasn’t enough. That I was too much. That my intensity, my attachment, my need to love in full sentences and finished actions and “I’m here, I’m here, I’m here” — that all of it must have been the reason. I carried that belief through every relationship that came after like a secret instruction manual: This is what happens when you love the way you love. People leave. It haunted me. It shaped how I understood myself. It turned every future connection into a test I assumed I’d fail.

A few weeks ago, we reconnected. Unexpectedly. Gently. Cautiously. The kind of reconnection that feels like opening a door in a house you haven’t entered in decades and finding the furniture exactly where you left it, covered in dust, still holding the outline of who you used to be. We talked about who we had become. About art. About my work. About the strange fact that I’m still here — still creating, still building, still trying to make meaning in a world that treats meaning like a luxury item.

And then she told me something that cracked the entire foundation of that old belief. She told me our relationship didn’t end because of some failure of mine, but because of circumstances around us that I never fully understood at the time. I’m not going into details. I’m not here to drag anyone. I’m not here to put someone else’s life under a microscope. I’m here to tell you what it did to me: that single truth healed an almost twenty-year wound. A wound I had lived with since I was young. A wound I had written around and bled into poems and tried to cauterize with philosophy.

For the first time in almost twenty years, I felt the weight lift. I felt something like hope — not the cheap kind, not the motivational poster kind, but the deep physiological kind, the kind where your body stops bracing for impact for a moment. I felt like I could trust the person I used to be. I felt worthy again. I felt less cursed. Less defective. Less like love was a thing I was built to offer but never allowed to keep. It wasn’t just closure. It was repair. It was the universe finally correcting a sentence it had misspelled in my life story.

And then today I received a message saying she no longer wants to continue any communication with me.

I’m not going to post screenshots. I’m not going to turn private words into public spectacle. But the message, in essence, was this: she reflected on our conversation, she’s pleased for my creative achievements, and she doesn’t think we should continue speaking. The life path I follow is my choice, but she does not agree with my “principles” and finds them difficult to process. She wished me and my spouse well, asked for distance, and set a boundary.

That was it. That was the end.

And in truth, I do not understand. And I don’t think I ever will.

Because this wasn’t a casual reconnection. This wasn’t nostalgia. This wasn’t two strangers trading updates. This was twenty years of quiet grief finally being seen — and then pulled away in an instant. Losing that connection again, right after finally healing the original wound, feels like someone tore open the oldest scar in my body with their bare hands. It feels like being handed a stitch kit after bleeding for two decades… and then watching the thread get ripped out mid-knot.

I know what “principles” she meant. I’m not clueless. I didn’t suddenly become unable to read subtext. I told her the truth about who I am now — about how I love, how I build relationships, the ethics I live by, the shape of my life. I told her I am polyamorous. I told her my spouse knows and supports me. I told her I am not playing games with people’s hearts, that this is not an excuse for harm, that if anything it is the most accountable way I’ve ever been forced to love: in clarity, in consent, in truth spoken before it becomes a trap.

And somehow, that truth — that vulnerable, terrifying truth — became the reason for distance.

I want to be careful here, because I can already hear the comment sections of the world warming up. This is not a post asking you to debate polyamory. This is not a post asking you to diagnose her. This is not a post asking you to choose sides. I am not entitled to anyone’s comfort with my life. People have boundaries. People have beliefs. People can say, “I can’t.” That part, intellectually, I understand.

What I cannot describe — what I have no language for — is the way it lands in my body when the person who shaped my heart, my art, my sense of love, looks at the way I love now and can’t even stay in the same room with it.

It is one thing to be rejected by someone new. That hurts, yes, but it’s a familiar kind of hurt — the kind I wrote about in “The Anatomy of Hope’s Death,” the pattern where someone speaks in futures and then flips into administrative distance, where “I can’t wait to see you” becomes silence, where the porch light stays lit and nobody walks up the steps. I know that pain. I have maps for that pain. I can survive that pain.

This is different.

This is the origin story being revised again, but not in a healing way — in a way that deletes the one moment of peace I had finally earned. This is the person whose influence lives in my creative bloodstream saying, in effect, I can’t be close to you if this is who you are. This is the person who once taught me love-as-art now treating my love-as-ethics like it is something to recoil from.

And it is happening right after another loss that already had me on my knees.

Some of you have read my recent writing. You’ve seen the pattern I keep meeting: the near-miracle, the sudden collapse, the intimate future language that evaporates the moment it becomes real. You’ve watched me try to make sense of it with Ethicism — with moral clarity and tenderness and that stubborn belief that we can choose to be better, that care can be practiced like a discipline even when the world rewards the opposite. You’ve seen me try to keep the porch light on without letting it consume me.

This message did not just hurt me. It cracked something deeper than the heart. It went after the place where my entire internal mythology lives. Because this wasn’t just someone I loved. This was someone whose presence shaped what love even means to me. This was a person I loved every day since I last spoke to her. Every day. Quietly. Without asking anything of her. Without trying to chase her. Just… carrying the love like an ember you never put down.

And for a few weeks, reconnecting healed that ember into something warm again. It gave me confidence in myself again. It gave me hope again. It made me feel, for the first time in almost twenty years, that I wasn’t fundamentally defective. That the love I offered back then wasn’t a mistake. That maybe my fire wasn’t a curse.

And then one message came in and it felt like she reached into the hearth and dumped water on the coals.

People keep telling me, when things like this happen, that I should be grateful for closure. But I need to say this plainly: closure is not always a gift. Sometimes closure is a door slamming on your fingers after you finally thought you were inside. Sometimes closure is a wound being touched just long enough to prove it still exists.

I wish I could write this cleanly. I wish I could write this from a calm distance. I wish I could end this post with something like “I’ll be okay” or “I’m learning” or “I’m grateful for the time we had.” I’m not there. I’m not doing the hopeful arc today. I’m not doing the inspirational ending. I’m not going to polish this into something palatable so it can be consumed without discomfort.

I am destroyed.

And I don’t mean “sad.” I don’t mean “having a hard day.” I mean the specific kind of devastation where your soul feels like it has hairline fractures running through it and every breath makes them spread. The kind where you can’t tell if you’re grieving the person, the past, the lost possibility, or the part of yourself that had finally stopped blaming itself. The kind where you realize that even the things you thought were safe — the old love, the old wound, the healed scar — can still be taken from you.

I keep hearing the phrase “I do not agree with these principles” echoing like a gavel. Because those principles are not casual opinions to me. They are the architecture of how I try not to harm people. They are how I try to love with conscience. They are how I try to build something honest in a world that teaches us to lie about our needs until someone is already attached. They are what I chose after spending my whole life watching love be used as leverage. They are the part of me that tried to become better than the patterns that hurt me.

And to have that dismissed by the person who taught me what love looked like when it was alive… I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t know where to put it. I don’t know how to metabolize the contradiction.

Maybe this is what “The Loneliest Kind of Love” has always been circling: not just being unmatched in present relationships, but being unmatched even by the people who once felt like home. Being seen for a moment and then found unrecognizable. Being praised for creativity while being rejected for the ethics that creativity grew out of. Being told, in polite and distant language, that the way you love makes you too hard to hold.

I don’t have wisdom tonight. I have grief. I have the sound of something collapsing inside me that I can’t rebuild with words. I have an almost twenty-year wound that finally closed — and then reopened wider. I have the feeling of a story that has shattered me twice.

And I have the silence that follows.

---

To the person this is about:

If you ever read this—

I want to be careful with my words here, because the easiest thing in the world would be to make you the villain. It would feel good for five minutes. It would also be a lie. I don’t believe you meant to harm me. I believe you were trying to protect yourself. I believe you were trying to be honest in the only way you knew how.

But intention doesn’t erase impact.

Your message didn’t just “set a boundary.” It rewrote a healed wound back into an open one. It took the first peace I’d felt about us in nearly twenty years and shattered it in a single paragraph. And what I can’t stop circling is this: boundaries are meant to describe what you will do to care for your own safety and capacity, not to hand down a verdict on the “principles” of someone else’s love. When you framed my life as something you “disagree with” and “can’t process,” it didn’t land like a boundary. It landed like moral rejection. Like I was suddenly not a person you could be near — not because I harmed anyone, not because I lied, not because I was unsafe, but because the shape of my love did not fit inside what felt acceptable to you.

I understand you can’t be what I need. I can even understand you choosing distance. What I can’t make sense of is the way that distance was wrapped in therapy language that didn’t actually fit what happened. It created a fog around the hurt — as if the harm would become unarguable if it wore the right vocabulary.

I still care about you. I still love you, in the quiet permanent way I always have. I don’t want anything bad for you. I’m not here to punish you. Ethicism doesn’t let me do that — and even if it did, I don’t have the appetite for it.

But I need you to know I won’t be the same after this.

Maybe someday I’ll forgive you. Maybe the wound will scar over again. But whatever peace I had regained — the version of me who finally stopped blaming himself — you changed that. And I’m going to be honest: I don’t know how to forgive being healed and then undone.

I hope you never have to learn this lesson from the other side.