A Beautiful Violation Of My Solitude
Read more poetry by Britt Wolfe
I had built a life
that required no witnesses.
It was competent.
Self-contained.
Held together by routine,
resolve,
and the soft authority
of cats who believed
the world existed
for their comfort.
I knew how to be alone
without calling it loneliness.
I had learned the choreography—
keys always in the same place,
dinners eaten standing,
decisions made quickly
because there was no one
to negotiate with.
My solitude was not a wound.
It was an achievement.
And then you arrived
without asking permission
from the systems I had perfected.
Not loudly.
Not clumsily.
You entered the way gravity does—
inevitable,
uninterested in my careful balance.
You didn’t diminish the structure.
You leaned into it,
tested its strength,
and somehow made it larger.
This was the violation:
that your presence
did not compete with my independence,
but rendered it unnecessary
to perform.
That I could rest
without being less.
That the quiet I’d curated
began to include another rhythm—
your breath in the morning,
your weight on the other side of the bed,
the steady reassurance
of someone who stays
without needing to be convinced.
Even the cats noticed.
They recalibrated.
They allowed you
a fraction of their trust—
which is to say,
everything that mattered.
You disrupted nothing
and rearranged everything.
I had not prepared
for the way love could feel
like an intrusion
only because it asked
nothing in return.
No performance.
No vigilance.
No constant proof
that I deserved to be here.
Just presence.
Just this gentle trespass
into a life I thought
was finished becoming.
I call it a violation
only because I had forgotten
how fiercely I protected
what was mine.
But this—
this was not conquest.
It was arrival.
And if solitude was the country
I learned to govern alone,
then loving you
was the moment
I stopped needing
to patrol the borders.
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