love unreciprocated

The light from the sun filters through the trees, and lands on your face. I smile and brush the hair back from your face. Your eyes smile back and we drift off into a slumber matchless to anything I have ever known. Later on in this most breathtaking day I awake and find you curled up in my arms. I gaze at you sleeping, scanning each feature upon your face. Tracing them with my finger on your skin, and my heart skips a beat.

In my mind I see you, this loving person in a cage, your hands out stretched, reaching for the key to your freedom, which hangs from the branch of a tree just out of reach. You try many times to touch it, to have it and the freedom it stands for, but you give up, and accept your sentence. And only I can see the other key that lies within your reach, the one that hangs on my heart. I try to verbalize, to get you to understand the ease at which your quest for love can be found, but my words resonance in silence. Suddenly I hear you stir and I am drawn away from my visions and back to the most satisfying of times. Shhh, I whisper and softly stroke your face, a small smile comes through, then fades, leaving me feeling something I have never before felt in my life. The sun has almost finished setting into the sea and I realize that I could lay here forever as the warm breeze flows across us and never tire of such bliss. The male crickets begin their calling out to potential mates as I smile, and view your face in the growing moonlight that is now filtering thought the trees.

But soon, you will again kiss me goodbye and return to the life that you long to escape. Or so you have said. I will be here alone again, waiting for your scraps. Angry at my own foolishness for allowing myself to be a man stranded upon this island of love unreciprocated. I know when you leave, you’ll go home where you will be surrounded by riches beyond comprehension, and I understanding they mean more to you than I do. Yet, I seem unable to change it. Blind, and helpless, my own key calls to me, but I refuse to even reach for it.

Now, on the days I see you I soar. On the days I don’t, I pile them behind my heart, where they began smelling of lies, and become unbearable to view. A Dorian Gray portrait of lonely days existing in my heart. The sad days currently out number the happy. And when you do grace me with your presence and presents I feel cheap. But somehow the hopefulness still masks the lie and I smile, falling in love all over again. Finding I am grateful like an alley cat desperate for a bowl of milk, all the while hating myself for what I have become. Wondering how I could let myself fall prey to your touch and attention. Then another day comes when we bask in the sun like lovers with a future and I am buoyant. Still, I let you take my heart and hold it carrot like in front of your own. And like a puppy trying to please his master I shamefully follow you, never fully retaining the knowledge that I am being used. I do know I am a fool, I know you will never leave him but I am locked agonizingly in your hourglass, feeling the sands of your time run through my fingers, and like a man without a country I long for a home.