There is something ruinous about the way I love you.

Not ruinous in a loud, catastrophic sense,
but in the quiet way abandoned places fall apart.

Like a castle overlooking a black sea.

Windows hollowed into dark eyes.

Walls slowly taken by ivy
that never asked permission.

That is how you live inside me.

Not as something temporary,
but as something that takes root
and refuses to leave.

To love you is to walk through corridors
lit only by candlelight.

Every flame trembling
like it knows something I don’t.

The air is heavy there.

Thick with dust.
With memory.

With the echo of footsteps
that no longer belong to the living.

And still, I follow the sound of you through it.

I don’t love you safely.

I love you like a storm
that never fully arrives.

Always gathering
at the edge of the sky.

The kind that pulls at the ocean
until it forgets its boundaries.

You are the thunder I wait for.

The lightning that never strikes where I expect,
but always leaves something changed when it does.

There are ravens here too.

They rest along the iron gates of my thoughts.

Watching.

Patient.

Knowing.

They don’t speak,
but they understand
what it means to linger
where something has already ended.

Sometimes I think they are messengers
of what this love could become.

Something beautiful,
but marked by inevitability.

Because there is always inevitability
in this kind of love.

We were never meant to be gentle.

There is no sunlight here.

No easy laughter that carries without weight.

What we have is deeper than that.

Something carved from longing.

The kind of desire that feels like standing
at the edge of a cliff in the dark,
knowing the fall would ruin you
and leaning forward anyway.

You are not my peace.

You are the locked room
at the end of the hallway.

The one I was warned not to open.

You are the mirror
that shows me something slightly unfamiliar.

You are the ghost
that lingers
not to frighten,
but to be remembered.

And I will remember you.

Even if it means becoming something like the house itself.

Filled with echoes.

Shaped by absence.

Holding onto what is no longer there
as if it might return
if I am patient enough.

Even if loving you means becoming a story
told in quiet voices.

Something beautiful,
but broken.

There is tenderness in this too.

In the way I would gather every moment with you
like pressed flowers
between the pages of a forgotten book.

In the way I would learn the rhythm of your breathing
as if it were the last song I would ever hear.

In the way I would stay,
even as the walls begin to crack.

Even as the storm finally arrives.

Because it will arrive.

And when it does,
it won’t ask what we wanted.

It won’t care how deeply I loved you
or how much of you lived in me.

It will take what it takes,
as all things do,
and leave something quieter behind.

Something haunted.

If I had known from the beginning
this love would end in ruins,
I would have stepped inside anyway.

I would have lit the candles.

I would have opened every door.

I would have loved you like a gothic romance,
knowing it would end in ghosts,
and choosing you all the same.

(I knew it would end in ruins, and I still chose to walk all the way in.)