Lost Love

My poor lost love,
So caught up in a journey I cannot share.

I see your struggle,
and I whisper my encouragements from so far away.
This is not a maze that I can navigate on your behalf.
In this your must find your own way.

What can I tell you to give you strength?
That I know your potential exceeds the needs of this test?

Shall I hope you cannot see that potential and present ability are not synonymous?
Shall I wrap you in comfort spun from intellect and charisma?
Shall I trick you into pursuing the path I would choose for you?

Thus depriving you of the very independence of thought that I cherish in you?
Deprive you of your chief virtue?
Sweetly steal from you of the personal strength of character which makes you so much more than the role you cast for yourself?

And what would that leave for me but a lifetime of lies?
Shall I bat my lashes and pretend it would be the same?
Spend our life pretending to an equality of minds my actions had succinctly mocked?
Would I hope you would never become embittered and confront me?
Or would I instead hope for the confrontation to cleanse my guilt with your hate?

There is nothing soft and easy for me to offer you.
There is only truth and knowledge.
I do not know that you can do this.
I do not know that you can handle a relationship with me.
I do not know that you have what it takes.

I know that you are just now beginning to wonder
about the weightiness of choosing to accept my love.
You have begun to guess that accepting my surrender,
would be to surrender yourself.

And what does the adult you know of surrender?
Only that which would make you recoil; fear; distrust; flee.

Perhaps you have become too practical to survive a leap of faith.
Too rigid, stable, reliable;
Unable to embrace flexibility, enthusiasm, support without damage.

And I have no wish to damage you.

What can I tell you now, but that you have time?

I will not rush you.
My path is set and will continue apace.
My hand will be out to you for as long as it can reach.
My heart will be yours forever.