✨ a beautiful anchor✨
Sonnet XVII is exactly about loving in the unseen places — “not from the outside, but from within,” loving “as certain dark things are to be loved.”
Goodbye to me.
On February 17, years ago, I became someone else.
I loved someone the way Neruda wrote about…
in the shadow, without names, without witnesses,
where love is quiet and consuming
and believes it can live in the dark.
They arrived like an eclipse
and my life reorganized itself around that darkness.
I mistook surrender for depth and gifts for devotion.
When the light finally returned,
I saw what loving in the shadow had cost me…
the parts of myself that disappeared
while I was loving from within.
And now, years later, on another February 17,
the sky darkens again.
This time, I understand.
I am not saying goodbye to you.
I am saying goodbye to the person I was
before and during that eclipse of the heart…
the version of me who loved without protection,
who believed that love, if it was real enough,
would not wound.
That person is gone.
What remains is someone changed,
clearer, and unwilling to return to the dark.
I loved you deeply.
And because I loved that way… quietly, completely…
I will never be the same.
But… This goodbye is for her.
For the self who loved in the shadows,
and for the light I choose to keep.