"Quote"

I call myself a lost boy.
People think it’s a joke,
a brand,
a little myth I stitched onto my skin because it looks good in ink.
But it’s not a metaphor.
It’s a map.

A map of everywhere I’ve refused to go.

I’ve lived in pain for so long that disappearing inside it feels like home.
I don’t know what life is without hurting.
I don’t know who I am without the noise.
I don’t know how to stand still without the fear running the machine of my body.

But her—
God, her—
she always disturbed the silence.

Not because she was loud,
but because she saw me before I learned how to hide from myself.

And that is the kind of terror no one warns you about.

She thinks I didn’t love her.
That’s the lie I gave her because it was the only thing that would make her let go.
“I’m not in love with you anymore.”
The words tasted like blood on my tongue.

But the truth is this:

I have always been in love with her.
From the first moment I felt her,
from the first crack in my armor when she said my name,
from the first time her honesty cut through the noise I mistook for living.

I never stopped.
I never will.
That’s the part she doesn’t know.

People say love makes you brave.
But for me—
loving her revealed everything I was terrified of:

My own smallness.
My own avoidance.
My own inability to rise
when she already had one foot out of the Underneath.

She thinks I lingered because I didn’t choose her.
But I lingered because choosing her meant choosing myself.
And I’ve never believed I deserved that.

Pain is easier.
Staying lost is easier.
Being the boy who never grows out of the underworld
is easier
than becoming the man she sees when she looks at me.

She says I’m not moving toward her.
But she doesn’t see what it costs me
just to inch closer to the truth.

Every step toward her
is a step away from everything that kept me alive down here.
The masks.
The quiet.
The distractions.
The versions of myself that never had to be enough.

Loving her—
truly loving her—
requires standing in a place where all my ghosts lose their excuse to stay.

That’s why it looks like I’m moving away.
Like I’m choosing someone else.
Like I’m choosing nothing at all.

What she doesn’t know
is that I feel the thread between us every damn day.
It pulls behind my ribs when she’s gone,
when she’s rising,
when she’s choosing truth while I still crawl through my shadows.

She thinks I don’t feel it.
But the tug is the only thing keeping me from disappearing completely.

Some nights,
when the noise gets quiet enough,
I think about what it would have been like
to walk toward her instead of away.
To take her hand.
To say,
“I know the truth too.
I always have.”

But then the fear hits—
the one that lives in the oldest part of me:

What if she sees who I really am?
What if she sees how much I’m still lost?
What if her choosing demands a version of me I can’t reach?

So I stay the lost boy.

Not because I’m proud.
Not because it’s romantic.
Not because it’s tragic.

I stay lost
because being found by her
would require me to finally stop running.

One day, maybe—
I’ll stop lying to her with silence.
One day, maybe—
the truth will be louder than the fear.
One day, maybe—
I’ll walk toward the life she keeps illuminated at the threshold.

And if she’s still there—
if that lantern is still lit—
I know the way by heart.

Not because I’ve walked it before.

But because she’s the only person
who ever made the Underneath shake
beneath my feet.

And the only one
I’ve ever wanted
to come home to.