I wrote Hiding My Love in the tight, pulsing space between my throat and my silence, in that small Black hush where feeling is loud but the world has not earned the right to hear it. This poem is my testimony of what it costs to love like a secret scripture, to cradle a wild, living tenderness in a world that drops fragile things and then blames them for breaking. It is a quiet, trembling choreography of stepping forward, then back, of holding a fierce, private affection close to the bone because I know how often brown-skinned softness is mishandled, misnamed, or turned into spectacle. These lines are my map of what it means to love somebody with your whole, weathered heart while standing half in the shadows of your own life, watching yourself want more than you are brave enough to claim.
Hiding My Love
How do I say I love you while hiding that I do, when the words burn the back of my teeth like a prayer I was raised not to speak first?
Inside my chest, it is simple: your name moves through me like a hymn my grandmother used to hum over a sink full of dishes, ordinary and holy at the same time; but loving you in the open feels like placing the softest part of my Black, breakable self into hands that might not know how to hold anything that tender without flinching.
So I hold it back, not because this love isn’t real, but because history—mine, my mama’s, my people’s—has taught me that hearts rarely arrive alone; they drag behind them old stories, sharp edges, unspoken rules, and a weight of expectation that can turn a promise into a leash before you even notice the knot tightening.
I love you carefully, like I am carrying water in my bare hands across a long, cracked summer; not because you are hard to love, but because I know from every almost and every goodbye that losing you would not just sting a little—it would split the ground under me, send me back into that familiar, lonely wilderness where I start counting all the ways I was too much and not enough at the same time.
There is a brutal kind of honesty in the way love and fear keep showing up together at my door, both of them tracking mud across the floor of my chest; maybe intimacy is not the fantasy of fearless devotion at all, but the quiet decision to sit beside your shaking, to tell the truth about the tremor, and to keep choosing the room, the person, the risk—while your whole body remembers every time staying has not been enough to keep something from leaving.
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Author’s Note — We rarely admit how exhausting it is to keep something as large as love folded into the quiet corners of ourselves. Hiding it, even from the one it belongs to, can feel like the only way to protect a fragile, unfinished story from ending too soon.
— Author’s Note: I am learning, slowly and painfully, that the quiet often costs more than the confession; every unsent word sits between us like a long, held breath, a whole life I might have lived pressed into the thin margin of what-ifs. Hiding my love has asked me to live in the parentheses of my own story, to keep tracing outlines of a future I am too afraid to say out loud while watching you move through your days never knowing you are the axis mine keeps spinning around. This is my truth: I have swallowed “I love you” so many times my throat remembers it as a wound, and yet I keep choosing the ache of silence over the terror of watching your face not soften the way I’ve dreamed. If these lines find you, know they were written with shaking hands, with a Black, tired, still-hopeful heart that is finally willing to risk the page instead of spending a whole life hiding in the margins.
