Half Poem by Maya Reid

Half
You told me the other half today
I’d known there was something you’d been
Hiding
You hadn’t been lying, exactly,
Just telling me a half-truth
About your longer-for-other-half
Today you told me the other half
Well, sent me a link to discover it for myself
You sent me the link then went away
(Hopefully not for fear of what I’d say
Although that fear may be legitimate)
And I should have been relieved
I should have felt honored to have [re? ]gained your trust
I should have been as happy for you as I was
Before—I should have
But this is what I did
I salted my tea with a few tears
Crying at your articulation of what I’d feared for years
Crying for lack of understanding my reaction
Why fear?
Why this darker layer? Why anger?
And why, in some small corner of my soul, loss?
So I followed your lead and left too
Abandoned rationality and responsibility
To deal with you, as I so often do.
The bomb—again, negativity: why? —you’d dropped in my lap
Required processing time
And a space not enclosed by four familiar walls
So naught but I might be destroyed
I knew that I had to tell you what you’d told me
When the tables were turned, oh so long ago
Well, half-turned, really
For mine was but a desire, whilst yours
Seems well on its way to becoming reality
So I braved frigidity to wrestle with fallibility
And what I half-wanted, half-needed to say
But didn’t fully believe:
“It doesn’t change anything.
I love you.”
The secondly is patently, unfailingly true
Which is probably why the first statement
Seemed like yet another half-truth to me.
Why does something that changes nothing
About us
Have such a direct effect on me?
I have no problem with the change itself
That, again, is patently true
So is the problem the fact that it’s you?
Can you still be my constant
Having weathered such a shift?
Are you still, even?
Must something change?
I’ve always defined others by you,
And now you’ve redefined yourself
In a way that affects me not
And yet.
I love you,
But redefinition scares me.
For if you can’t be you and you can’t be him
(For his spot is taken forevermore)
Then whatever shall we be?
What shall become of the seemingly indestructible “we”?
Come to think of it,
A third option exists,
Kind of slightly halfway in the middle
Not as much as I’d like from either side
But present, and rather lovely.
I’ll try to place you there.
It shouldn’t require much change.
For, no matter your other half,
You’ll always be part of me.
Now I repeat,
And repeat confidently,
“It doesn’t change anything.
I love you.”