✨questioning ✨
She doesn’t know why
he looks at her like a burden he never asked for,
like her presence is a weight he resents carrying—
even when she’s doing all she can
to make herself small, easy, gentle.
Even when she’s quiet enough to disappear.
She doesn’t know why
her joy seems to irritate him,
why the sound of her laughter
makes his jaw clench
like it’s a language he forgot how to speak.
Why every time she tries to shine
he pulls the curtains tighter.
She doesn’t know why
he can’t say something kind
without sounding like he’s doing her a favor.
Why her beauty, her fire, her depth
feels like a threat to him instead of a gift.
Why he acts like loving her
might cost him everything he’s worked for.
He says she brings nothing to the table.
But it was never his table to begin with.
She is the forest that gave the wood,
the hands that built the fire,
the sacred hush before the prayer is spoken.
She is the table,
and the meal,
and the candle burning at the center of it all.
And he’s never known hunger
like the kind that gets fed
when a woman looks at him
and truly sees him—
not for what he earns,
but for who he is
when the world isn’t watching.
He doesn’t know how to make love
without feeling like he’s losing control.
So instead, he builds walls with rules
and calls it maturity.
He places her body on a schedule,
touches her only on his terms,
then wonders why she feels so far away.
He mistakes intimacy for weakness—
because the church his father built
taught him that power lives in distance,
and that God never weeps.
She doesn’t know why
her body feels like a crime scene
and his touch feels like a courtroom.
Why she’s always defending her softness
as though it’s something shameful.
Why she feels like she has to apologize
just for needing tenderness
from a man who says he loves her.
But he knows.
Deep down,
he knows.
He knows that the god he worships
wears a suit and signs checks
and never cries.
He knows that his father’s religion
never made room for a woman
with a wild heart and a knowing gaze—
only for wives who stayed quiet
and bowed their heads
and didn’t ask for too much.
And she—
she is too much.
Too sacred.
Too honest.
Too awake.
So he calls her a leach,
a taker,
a distraction from his purpose.
When really—
she’s been trying to show him
that money will never touch the parts of him
that feel unloved.
That success will never rock him to sleep
when he’s breaking in silence.
That her love was never his enemy.
It was his doorway.
His reckoning.
His return.
But he isn’t ready.
So he punishes her wholeness
and calls it her flaw.
He shames what he cannot open.
He walks away from what he secretly craves.
She doesn’t know why.
But if he ever let himself break—
if he ever asked the real questions,
the ones that live beneath the performance—
he’d find her there,
not waiting in silence,
but standing in truth.
Not as a mother to heal him,
not as a lesson to teach him,
but as a mirror—
clear, unwavering,
reflecting back the man
he’s afraid to become.
She was never a test.
She was the threshold.
And she was always
deserving of being chosen—
not because she stayed,
but because she saw him
and still opened her hands.