The profound nature of art and truth is that what’s meant to be about someone else often feels like it’s written just for us, holding a mirror to our own soul. That’s the gift of true connection—even the darker ones we share as souls. I think that’s part of what agape love truly is: not just love for others, but a love that grows us from within, often through pain.
Have you ever felt destroyed by someone outside of yourself? Someone who played a part in your death, your outgrowing, your evolution—by breaking your heart?
This year, for me, feels like a pinnacle moment of those experiences. Not just because of a single situation, but because of the compounded grief of so much human loss in my life. Loss to cancer. Loss to other sicknesses the government could do far more to prevent if they truly cared for us.
What I do know is this, and I want to remind you: it was YOU who did the work. It was you who faced the pain, who carried the weight, and who emerged from it. Maybe that version of you—the one who endured, who broke, who transformed—deserves the same agape love from yourself. Love that sees and cherishes the light within, even when it flickered in the shadows, even when it was buried in the mess.
That’s no small thing: to love the parts of yourself that had to be broken to make you who you are now.
If you read this poem as I wrote it—as a reflection of the self you’ve left behind—it might feel like a way of saying goodbye with grace. A way of honoring the version of you who carried you through the darkness, even if they couldn’t come with you into the light.
The masterpiece of your life wasn’t just them, or the situation, or the person who broke you to guide you home—it was you. It is you, becoming who you are now.
Keep going.
“Threadbare Elegy”
You—
or someone like you,
an unnamed, untamed soul stitched into the fabric of my being.
A tapestry woven in contradictions—
silk spun from shadow,
beauty that bruises,
a masterpiece that aches to the touch.
They say love is patient.
But patience wears thin,
threadbare against the grindstone of your chaos.
I stood there, didn’t I?
Unwavering.
Unbroken.
Except where I broke for you,
a thousand tiny fractures
invisible to the naked eye.
They say love is kind.
But kindness tastes bitter
when you gave me your sharp edges,
your hollow truths,
and your empty gratitude,
served on a platter of excuses.
And yet—
you glowed.
Oh, how you glowed.
A star that devours itself,
casting light and shadows in equal measure.
Even now,
I can’t unsee the beauty of you,
even when it cuts me open.
This is agape, isn’t it?
To love in full knowing,
to adore the divine spark even when it’s buried
beneath rubble and ruin.
To see the masterpiece in the mess,
to cherish the music in the discord.
To stand at the altar of your soul
and weep for what it could have been,
what it refuses to become.
You are the thorn in my side,
the splinter in my palm,
the salt and the sting.
But you are also the sunrise I didn’t deserve to see,
the rain that fell on a parched, cracked earth.
You are a wound,
and you are the healing.
You are everything and nothing all at once.
I still pray for you—
or someone like you.
For your soul, for your light,
for the pieces of you that are scattered
like breadcrumbs on a darkened path.
And I will love you,
not as you want,
not as you demand,
but as you are.
Even now,
when your absence tastes like freedom
and your memory burns like shame,
I love.
Because it’s what I do,
what I must.
And I leave it all in the hands of God,
who can bear what I cannot.
So take this threadbare elegy,
this hymn to the paradox of you.
Keep it, or cast it away.
I’ll love anyway—
because it’s not for you.
It’s for the light within you,
the light I saw,
the light I leave behind.
-ttp
The Twin Tree Project 