You asked me to love you,
to let you into the crevices of my tangled soul,
to know your heart and mind as you lent them to me.
And so I knew you
I cherished you,
filled myself with you until
they asked me who I was
and I gave them your name.
In this, I had made two great errors.
One, to let go of myself so easily.
You never asked me to do such a thing,
but nevertheless,
I emptied myself of me
so I could have more space for you.
You were – and are – beautiful.
There was no mistake in knowing it.
But in worshiping your beauty
I lost my own –
I lost how God had sculpted and formed me,
the design I was created with,
the art I was meant to paint
with my own colors.
You did not take my colors from me, I know.
You didn’t deplete my beauty, no.
I was just so filled with you
that I abandoned myself;
I abandoned another creature –
the one in the mirror –
the one God had also created for His glory.
And my second error –
an all too human one at that –
was that I had become so in love with you,
so full of you,
so blinded by my worship of you,
that I forgot to ask you
to love me in return.
I forgot to ask you to find your own obsession
with my divinity,
to fill your own tangled soul
with me
as I had done with you.
And in return for my first error,
there was no beauty in me as I loved you.
And in return for the second,
I was left unknown.
.
.
.
5.12.22