Love is a chalice I refuse.
My past and present mirror each other,
reflecting the same unaltered truth:
that every hand that offered it was already stained,
and every sip promised was laced with ash.
I have learned the taste of the cup,
and it is the taste of my own blood,
of promises that curdled in the air before they could be spoken. The love they spoke of was a room with no exit,
a beautiful, suffocating shrine built upon my own silence.
Now I choose to dwell in melancholy and sweet oblivion.
I will make a home in the quiet ruins of my own heart.
Let the shadows be my companions;
they, at least, ask for nothing I cannot give.
Let the world of sun and connection blur into a distant, silent painting—a thing observed, but never entered.
For to feel nothing is a kinder wound than to feel the wrong thing, deeply and again.
Here, in the cool, forgiving dark,
I will nurse the one true love I have left:
a perfect, crystalline despair.
It does not lie.
It does not leave.
It simply is, a constant companion in the empty cathedral of my becoming.l