self worth

I did you a favor, though perhaps
you will need distance to understand it.
Some things are only recognized as rare
after someone careless has lost their chance to hold them.

I gave you access to a version of me
I had learned to protect with extraordinary care.
Not because I was impossible to reach,
but because I understood what access could cost.

I did not choose you from loneliness.
I had already built a life before you arrived.
You were invited into something standing,
and somehow I still made room.

I learned the architecture of your silences,
the weather hiding behind your words.
I noticed what exhausted you, what frightened you,
what you tried hardest not to reveal.

There is intimacy in being known like that.

Not attraction.
Not convenience.
Not the temporary thrill of being wanted.
The rarer kind: being understood without performance.

I saw what was difficult about you.

I noticed the contradictions,
the arrogance behind certain defenses,
the distance between who you said you were
and who your choices sometimes revealed.

And somehow, I still believed
the better parts deserved consideration.

Perhaps that was generous of me.

I gave you the benefit of doubts
you had done very little to earn.
I translated inconsistency into complexity,
hesitation into fear, distance into circumstance.

You may call that love.

I occasionally call it poor judgment.

Still, what I offered was real.

I gave you softness without demanding perfection,
loyalty without requiring a performance.
I wanted to understand you, not redesign you,
and people spend lifetimes looking for that.

You happened upon it.

That distinction matters.

You did not create my capacity for tenderness.
You did not teach me depth or devotion.
Those things belonged to me long before you.
You were simply fortunate enough to receive them.

For a while.

Maybe you thought that kind of love was ordinary.
Maybe you assumed someone else would come along
and notice the details, interpret the silences,
and make the complicated parts feel worth knowing.

Perhaps they will.

But someday, when something feels slightly absent,
when a question goes unasked
or a part of you goes unseen,
maybe you will finally understand.

There was a time I thought
being chosen by you made me fortunate.

Distance corrected that.

You were trusted with tenderness
I had protected for years,
and loved with a depth
you did not have to earn twice.

So yes,

I did you a favor.

I let you know what it felt like
to matter profoundly to someone
who could have given that love anywhere else.

And someday, perhaps,
you will understand exactly what that was worth.

Hopefully by then
I will have stopped caring
whether you ever do.

I do not know why I cannot let you go,
when you are everything I promised I would never choose.
You carry every warning sign I know,
every kind of love I swore I would refuse.

We have almost nothing in common,
and somehow, we are painfully the same.
Two chameleons changing with the room,
shifting colors just to hear someone say our name.

We learned how to become what others needed,
how to bend before they ever asked us to.
Desperate to be wanted, to be chosen,
to make ourselves enough for someone new.

But you became controlling beneath the charm,
arrogance disguised as certainty and grace.
Careless with the hearts you held too loosely,
always keeping one more option in its place.

You cheated truth before you cheated trust.
You played your games and called them circumstance.
Indecision became another weapon,
keeping me suspended in the hope of chance.

And I know what loving you would cost me.

I would have to soften every boundary,
silence pieces of myself you could not bear.
I would have to shrink to fit your expectations,
change my shape until I disappeared in there.

I refuse.

I have spent too many years becoming
someone I can finally recognize.
I will not trade the woman I have fought for
just to become pleasing to your eyes.

So tell me why my heart still reaches backward.

Why does logic lose its voice when memory speaks?
Why can one remembered moment resurrect you
after I have spent whole months becoming free?

Maybe I do not miss you.

Maybe I miss who I became beside you.
The version of myself who felt enough.
The way you listened like my words were sacred,
the way your attention masqueraded as love.

You made me feel seen
in places I had hidden.

You made me feel chosen
before you made me disappear.

And maybe that is why the wound stays open:
you gave me everything I wanted most to hear.

Then you lied.

You left.

You erased me
with astonishing precision.

As though I had been nothing
but a temporary decision.

And that is what I cannot reconcile.

How someone can memorize the smallest parts of you,
hold your secrets like they matter,
build a future out of careful words,
then walk away
as though there was never anything to shatter.

The cruelest part is knowing
you already knew.

While I was falling,
you were calculating the landing.

While I was building something permanent,
you were already planning your abandoning.

You had an ending
hidden in your pocket
while I was still believing in the start.

And I was foolish enough
to call your architecture fate
while you were quietly designing
how to break my heart.

I hate that I believed you.

I hate that somewhere underneath the anger,
there is still tenderness I cannot kill.

I hate that knowing exactly who you are
has never taught my heart
how not to want you still.

Because you are everything I do not want.

And somehow,
you became the thing
I cannot forget.

A contradiction
wearing the face of a memory.

A lesson
I understand completely
and have not learned yet.

Perhaps that is our final similarity:

Two chameleons
desperate to be loved.

Only I am finally learning
that love should never require
changing color
until no trace of you
remains.

Angel Boucher

Inspired Minds

Consider Yourself Lucky

Chameleon Hearts