Unclasped

They say it was the absence of outings,
candles unlit in restaurants,
heels that never touched the night,
necklaces unclasped in their boxes—
as if one ritual, forgone,
could bear the weight of our undoing.

But date nights were no cure,
only a symptom of what we could not name:
hungers unmet,
desires uncourted,
the fabric fraying where touch
had long since thinned.

Do not think you were undesired—
I reached in gestures,
in quiet offerings,
in words meant to keep us near.
But longing cannot breathe
when its bids go unanswered.

And when we sat across the table,
what lingered was not anticipation
but a script already written—
adventure made tame,
desire bound before it stirred.
The wine glass stood half-full of silence.
The night ended as it always did—
you turning from the boudoir,
I retreating to the narrow exile
of the spare room,
unsatisfied, hollow,
loneliness worn like a second skin.

That cycle was not intimacy,
but a mirage dressed as ritual:
an empty husk of play,
bereft of eros,
lacking the pulse of hope.
Each attempt deepened the fracture
it pretended to mend.

No, it was not date nights lost,
but something far vaster:
a lattice of unmet needs,
a compass gone slack,
a seam we let unravel.
The breakdown was many-threaded,
woven of silences and missed turnings,
not the neglect of a borrowed ritual
in the glow of a fading flame.

Let us not forget—
how pure, how ferociously rare
was the bond we carried,
how much of love’s vast potential
lit our path.
And how many storms, unbidden,
rose against us in sequence,
tempests not of our making,
yet endured, side by side.

And so I ask you:
do not reduce our undoing
to the absence of a ritual.
It was the absence of renewal,
of delight,
of daring to meet
where our deepest longings lived—
a chamber unopened,
a music still waiting,
a home we almost built,
its light not fully gone.