She whispers into my ear, revealing love’s quiet secret: happiness lives in a smile.
She leans toward me, desiring my peace, my assurance, resting her head against my chest: waiting, breathing in slow motion, as if my heart itself must learn how to curve into joy, her delight the soft seduction of love.
I feel it rise slowly, that gentle awakening, a smile forming not just on my lips but in the quiet spaces between us, where breath meets breath and longing softens into warm embrace .
A smile, I say to her, is an eternal gesture of bliss, of desire, of memory being born in the fragile now.
A smile has a soul, she whispers. It dwells at the edge where love and happiness speak in silence, where tenderness becomes knowing, where intimacy is the quiet secret of commitment.
My second poem of January unfolds as a narrative of emotional exposure: raw, unguarded, and aching. It speaks to the quiet devastation of loving deeply while remaining unloved. The speaker stands as a witness to a fragile relationship he labored to nurture and protect, only to lose both the beloved and the love he poured into her.
“Notes from a Fragile Love”
I let you go because the tenderness I offered was never returned. The passion I carried became too heavy to hold alone.
When I told you I missed you, you turned away, as if longing were a foreign language you refused to learn.
When I reached out for comfort, you said, “You’re a man; deal with it.” In that moment, you taught me that vulnerability had no shelter with you. You wanted emotional connection in theory, but when it was mine, it became inconvenient.
You wanted to hold my hand in public: not for love, not for passion, but to be seen, to borrow visibility without commitment. You wanted the appearance of us, not the responsibility.
You rationed the words “I love you,” as if they were scarce. I gave them freely, infinitely, to seal your heart and mine. You wanted us hidden when it mattered, a secret folded into convenience. I wanted love that could stand in the light.
I carried your words inside me like scripture; you erased mine as if they never mattered. I remembered your heartbreak line by line, while you put on earbuds to silence mine.
I treasured your moans during lovemaking, the way your body spoke trust intimacy desire connection yet in motion, you called his name, and I learned my presence was never singular.
When I spoke of a future with you, you said you weren’t ready. When I imagined a child, a son bearing both our names.
You laughed, and my hope became a joke.
That is when I understood: I was listening with my whole soul to someone who had already tuned me out.
And that is why I let you go. Not because I stopped loving you, but because I finally loved myself enough to stop offering intimacy where it could not rest.
Most of us do not know how to live. Untrained in the art of the good life, we move forward by learning how to endure the circumstances that shape and constrain us.
“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.” —Oscar Wilde
I want to wish you a happy last Sunday of December and the final Sunday of 2025! May it be filled with reflection, gratitude, and hope for the year ahead.
I am not sure if these Parisian photos of mine go together with this post; oh well, I feel like posting them because Paris is one of my favorite places to visit—especially the Louvre museum—and that I didn’t take any international trips this year. Lol
drcelucienjoseph, "Thinking and Meditating" 