When You Tell a Man NO

At first, he was immaculate.
A man stitched from your longing—
every smile angled just so,
every word bent to catch your breath
like light through stained glass.
He studied the tilt of your head,
the rise and fall of your voice,
and composed himself accordingly.
How easy it is to wear virtue
when desire is being indulged.

But say no—
and the scaffolding shakes.
The polish runs thin,
and what stands beneath it
is not grace but grievance.
Suddenly, kindness was never kindness,
only coin he thought he could spend.
Suddenly, patience was a performance,
love a ledger,
and your body an agreement
he believed had already been signed.

This is how you learn him.
Not in the yes, where masks hold fast,
but in the refusal,
the resistance,
the refusal to play your part in his story.
The moment you decline the script,
he reveals the director’s chair,
the spotlight, the stage
where you were meant only
to perform devotion on cue.

And oh, the disappointment—
to discover you had not met a man,
but an actor rehearsed in intimacy.
His tenderness was only costume,
his listening a practiced pause,
his love a counterfeit printed
on the thin paper of want.
The man you thought you held
never existed at all.

But even in the ruin there is clarity.
A man revealed by resistance
is a man unworthy of surrender.
And though your heart aches with the loss
of who you believed him to be,
your no remains luminous—
a small, steady torch
burning down the theatre
until nothing remains
but the truth of his absence.

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