The Storm That Taught Me Depth Has Limits

There are people who arrive not as a promise, but as a warning written in stars you still wish on.

Dean wasn’t soft.
Not at first.
Not ever, really.
But there was something in the way his chaos mirrored mine.
Like two broken compasses spinning toward one another,
not to find home
but to burn down every place we once called safe.

He came to me during the unraveling.
Not just of my marriage, but of myself.
He didn’t save me. He didn’t even try.
He simply saw me; raw, wounded, wide open, and I mistook that sight for sanctuary.

There was no gentle beginning.
No gradual fall.
It was wildfire.
Three a.m. confessions and late night messages soaked in vulnerability we didn’t know how to hold.

He asked for my truth.
I gave it to him, bleeding.
He said I was the calm in his storm,
but I never realized he was the storm I kept trying to survive.

I would’ve written him a thousand poems if it meant he’d stay still long enough to read one.
But he was always halfway gone
one foot in, one eye elsewhere, one hand barely touching mine.

Still, I stayed.
I built altars in my chest just to worship the version of him I imagined.
The version that would choose me; if only he weren’t scared, if only he weren’t married, if only the timing was better, if only the universe wasn’t cruel.

But the truth was: he never had to choose me.
I had already chosen him.
And in doing so, I forgot to choose myself.

He made me feel everything and nothing in the same breath.

One moment, I was his clarity.
The next, I was a secret too sacred to speak aloud.

He wanted me in the shadows.
In stolen hours and muted tones.
In glances that felt like lifetimes, and lifetimes that never felt like enough.

There was a Saturday sunset in Kansas where he sang to me
& for a moment, it felt like the world paused just to let us breathe.

But even that moment was borrowed.

And we both knew it.

I became poetry because of him.

Not the kind that lives in journals.
The kind that bleeds
in car rides, in voice notes unsent, in tattoos inked just to remember how it felt to ache that much and still call it beautiful.

I never got a clean goodbye.
Just a fading.
A slow retreat into silence where the louder I screamed internally, the quieter he became.

He didn’t leave with anger.
He left with indifference.
And that, I think, hurt more than anything.

Because I would rather be hated by him than erased.

But here’s what I know now:

Dean was never meant to stay.
He was a mirror.
A reflection of what I was craving, depth, intimacy, understanding; held in the hands of someone who didn’t have the capacity to give it.

He was the lesson in disguise.
The one that told me:
“Depth doesn’t mean destiny.”
Just because someone touches your soul doesn’t mean they’re meant to keep it.

I forgive myself for loving him.

For falling for the potential, the almost, the ache.
For believing that my softness could make him stay.
For thinking I had to shrink to be loved quietly instead of being held loudly.

But most of all, I forgive myself for waiting
for closure, for a message, for anything.

Because the closure was never going to come from him.
It had to come from me.
From burning the shrine.
From letting go of the fantasy.
From saying, “This hurt. But I survived it. And I am still worthy.”

He may never know what he meant to me.
And that’s okay.
Because I know what he meant.

He was the storm that stripped me bare.
The silence that taught me to scream inward.
The ghost that made me write again.

And though I would never choose that kind of ache again,
I carry it like a scar, visible only to the parts of me still healing.

Dean didn’t love me.
But because of him,
I learned to love myself enough to stop asking for scraps.