“Fear and Love” began as a whisper I almost ignored, a memory of how quickly I let fear speak for me when love asked for time. Writing it, I wanted to stay inside that quiet after the storm, to see whether the leaving belonged to you, or to the braver version of myself I never quite let arrive.
Fear and Love
I couldn’t hear your voice through the thunder.
Fear came easily, stealing my patience,
and in that unsteady moment
I abandoned the love
that once loved me back.
Now the storm has thinned to memory,
and I stand in the quiet it left behind,
wondering if love ever truly left—
or if I was simply too afraid
to stay and listen.
I wrote this in the quiet after panic had already done its damage, when I could finally see how quickly fear can masquerade as protection. It’s a small confession that the worst thing I abandoned wasn’t you, but the version of myself that knew how to stay.
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Fear has a talent for dressing itself up as caution, a reasonable voice asking you to wait just a little longer. This piece sits with the grief of realizing that by the time you see the disguise for what it is, the love it kept you from has already slipped quietly out of reach.
— Author’s Note: Sometimes I think of “Fear and Love” as a quiet autopsy of a choice I made too quickly. Letting fear speak louder than love felt like safety in the moment, but the echo of that silence arrived years later as a different kind of loneliness. This poem is my way of sitting with that cost long enough to learn from it, without rewriting the past.
