Let Me Be Reached

The moon loves the sun it cannot reach. It wears the fire across its frigid face and turns it toward the earth, and every voice below lifts to praise it for a light it has only borrowed. The moon is content. To wear the beauty of another is enough.

I loved as the moon loves. I turned toward whoever warmed me and wore their desire as my own, and I shone so faithfully that they believed the fire was mine. When they walked on, they took my fire with them, and I stood in shadow and grieved, and blamed the shadow.

An echo owns no voice of its own. It waits in the hills for another’s voice, and then it answers, softer and sweeter. The one who cried believes the hills themselves are singing back to him. I was made into such an echo, and I grew skilled.. I let the voices of others pass into me and returned them, gentle and sweet, so that whoever spoke to me heard something lovelier than what they spoke. That sweetness was love to me. And all the while my own voice lay still.

A man gives himself away, and it is done in a most gentle way. Even he believes it kindness.

While he is small he learns which of his colors will be admired. He becomes that color and lets his truth grow pale. He becomes soft where softness is wanted and quiet where quiet is desired, and he reads others the way a sailor reads the sky. He grows so gifted at being wanted that he forgets the child beneath it who longed only to be loved. Is this tenderness? Often it might be. But the softness was often fear gone smooth as silk, and I wore that silk like a man born to it.

They asked me where I wished to go, and I said wherever. They asked me what I hungered for, and I said only what you hunger for. I offered an empty vessel and made that my gift, and they drank and found me dry. I grew bitter that they were still thirsty.

There were people who loved me. It shames me how long it took to say so, for their love took from me my sweetest sorrow. They loved the man I had built, the one who wanted little and could bear much, and I gave him everything true in me so the man might seem alive. My laughter, my history, my warmth. And then I watched them love him, and I felt myself a ghost.

I built my own religion, and I worshipped a single commandment. If you loves me, you will hear what I refuse to say. You will find the thirst and the fearful child within the pleasantries. You will know that when I say I am well I am asking you to come closer, and you will come unasked, and that is love’s proof.

I asked to be taken, a beggar at a well asking water to rise to his lips and spare him the labor of the rope. I wished them to know me through the act, and to love a want I had buried too deep for her to see. I wished them to read the depths of me while the rope stayed coiled and dry in my hand.

For years I said the world loved only what my hands could give, and the words had the taste of sorrow. They hid a harsher thing. That my hands were the only part of me I ever gave. So I cooked and I mended and I listened and I protected, and I made myself needful even if I was afraid to be known.

Being needed outlasts being loved, and I chose it every time. I fed the people I loved so they would stay, and when they grew strong enough to leave the table, I felt betrayed, though I had only ever been the meal, never the guest.

The moon grows round and disappears to a sliver and rounds again, and we write our poems to the changing moods. But the moods are the sun’s, given and withdrawn. The moon is one body in different light. So it was with me. Gentle in one love and cold in the next, brave for one and timid for another. It was the truth of a man who comes to love already emptied, waiting to be filled with whatever the other pours, and then grieving the man he’d abandoned at the door.

I was asked outright what I wanted once. I had a hundred answers and gave them all a single grave. I wanted people to unsee what they had seen and to never say the word lonely. And more than either, I wanted pardon for making people watch how carefully I had built my loneliness.

I said, Nothing.

And, there, I had been given me the very silence I begged for, and I hated them for honoring it. Such is the grief of the man who empties himself. He swears the weapon is always in the another’s hand.

I dreamed of being seen by one I refused to show myself to, of giving an empty hand and receiving one filled, of being sought by a woman who could not guess that I was in hiding. Such a woman lives only in the dreams a lonely man builds.

And still, even now, someone asks me some small and simple thing. Where shall we eat? Did I hurt you? And I feel the sweetness rise in me, hunting the answer that will keep the world warm and true. And I try, now, before sweetness wins, to say the truth. Sometimes it sounds like wisdom, but mostly I sound like a frightened child. Sometimes, they run.

The price I ran from all my life.

Love was the word I gave the fear, having no softer to give it.

Since before the first watching eye, the moon has worn the sun's fire and shown the world one side. Barren, and shackled to heaven. But here the moon and I come to disagree. The sky is its keeper, and fear was the only warden I ever had.

What the moon can never do, a man still can. He can come down. He can leave the worship and the light that was never his, and stand on the ground where someone might reach out and find him warm. The mystery of the dark side loses its terror down here. Only from far up did it look like shame.

Let me be reached instead of adored. Let me climb down from this lonely sky.