I heard you before the music did.
Before the room learned how to listen.
You were already counting what was lost
as if loss were a form of devotion.

You went down by way of hunger.
By broken vows you still polished with your sleeve.
You called it love, then mercy,
then said the words no longer mattered.

I didn’t follow you there.
I was already underneath.

You were looking for the place where the body gives up
its small arguments with time,
where names fall away
and desire stops pretending it wants to be saved.

I knew that place.
I was raised in it.

You kissed as if each mouth were a confession.
As if forgiveness were something lips could negotiate.
You thought depth meant surrender.

You were wrong.
Depth is recognition.

I watched you kneel to the ache you carried
like a relic wrapped in silk.
You wanted to be undone by it.
You wanted it to prove you had loved enough.

But love isn’t proved.
It arrives.
It stays.
Or it doesn’t.

You went searching for God between two breaths,
between two strangers,
between the blade and the wound.
You called that holiness.

I stayed with the living.

I stayed where the hands remember
what the mouth refuses to say.
Where the heart learns restraint
without becoming cold.

You kept descending,
naming each step like a prayer,
until even the prayer grew tired of you.

I did not follow.
I did not need to.

There are depths that are not entered by falling.
There are depths that open only
when you stop trying to disappear.

You asked for a thousand kisses.
You mistook number for devotion.
You mistook hunger for truth.

I answer with one.

One that does not bruise.
One that does not beg.
One that does not need witnesses
or metaphors
or absolution.

One that remains
after the music ends,
after the voice breaks,
after the ache finally tells the truth.

And the truth is this:

You went looking for depth
as if it were a punishment.

I was already there,
waiting—
not to be taken,
not to be forgiven,
but to be met.