(for Dakota)
I see now
what I couldn't before;
how you've been leaving from the beginning.
(Born to do so in fact.)
We, wholly new to the other, cross pollinated. Me to you, you to me, creating life in the other where there was lack.
Foreign, I came to marvel at the breadth of you.
Drawn to that oh-so-winsome space you inhabited;
space carved by fierce commitment to what is good. And right.
There, I found a kind of shelter,
forged undeserved under your able and tender wing;
where seeing past everything I wasn't, and didn't turn out to be, you loved anyway.
Harbor.
And, so it is here in our story, that we arrive. That place where you pull away, even as I withdraw.
A sacred retraction; where your person, informed in part by me, becomes your own. And, I reclaim all those strands that both bound and protected. (Which if I'm honest, were really just tethers cleating my own place in the world.)
Now, together, but separate, we move out into environs unknown. Loosed to become our next selves.