After the Argument - Poem

We think love should feel like certainty -

a steady hand on the back,

a voice that never trembles.

But love is a classroom

and we arrive as children

pretending to be adults.

We do not fall for perfection.

We fall for familiarity.

For echoes of old rooms.

For the tone that once hurt us

but feels like home.

And so when you grow distant

my body does not see the present

it sees an archive.

Dust rises.

A younger self runs to fix what cannot be fixed.

You say, “It’s nothing.”

My pulse hears, “I'm too much.”

You say, “I’m tired.”

My chest hears, “I'm alone again.”

We think we argue about the dishes,

about the text not sent,

about tone.

But beneath the words

two histories are colliding -

two private mythologies

begging not to be repeated.

There is nothing shameful in your need.

It was shaped in weather

you did not choose.

The task is not to feel less -

but to interpret more kindly.

To pause at the cliff edge of assumption

and ask,

“What else could this mean?”

To know that your beloved

is not a villain in your childhood story,

but a flawed traveller

with their own ghosts

mistaking you for someone else.

Love is not finding

the one who never triggers you.

It is finding someone

willing to sit beside you

when the trigger fires -

and say,

“This fear is old.

We are new.

Let’s not confuse them.”

And perhaps maturity is this:

learning that emotions are weather,

not verdicts.

That the storm inside you

is real - but not always true.

And that the bravest intimacy

is not intensity,

not fusion,

not rescue -

but two imperfect people

studying their reactions

like philosophers,

choosing again and again

to answer history

with gentleness.