The saddest thing / After the Fall

I know he is going to say it before he does. For several long tense minutes as we drive to the station, and more; for the hours and days that have gone before. I have steered conversations onto different courses. I have steadfastly remained ignorant of the signs and signals or talked over the unspoken admissions. I have become infectiously giddy when the tenor dipped towards those ominously confidential notes.

But he is determined that it be said. So we both brace ourselves against the sound of someone saying I love you and not hearing it returned.

If love is the greatest joy in this world, why is there none here?

There is a little shard of something working its way in deeper that I am walking around with still, and it has something to do with how when I said I didn’t feel it he shook his head minutely, rapidly, the instant those words left my mouth, a reaction, a renouncement of hope, a shrugged-off sense of shame, that came from being prepared to hear it and from the realisation that it was never possible to truly be prepared.

Until the fall, they knew not of shame.

When I was thirteen I fell off my bicycle one day, on the way home from school. There is a little crack in that day, a hairline fracture, so that there was Before and an After. There was no bravery Before, because to be brave you have to know fear. You can’t unlearn fear. There is not way back after the fall.

I am sorry. I don’t want to be sorry. I want every declaration of love to be celebrated.

My beautiful boy. Please don’t love any less easily.