I knew he loved me even when he said that he most certainly did not. I knew it, though I also knew that he could not express what he felt when he said my name or when he saw me curl away from the morning light or the way I looked when I was freshly scrubbed and clean and new from the shower before bed.

When I first told him that I loved him it was cold and late March, I was leaving for school soon and afraid. He asked me to stop before I could finish my sentence and a small, childish part of my insides recoiled and wanted to hide away in his untidy and unkept closet full of brown sweaters and Nautica t-shirts. He told me that we barely knew each other then and he was right, though I did not know it at the time that our relationship had hardly begun.

For some time I felt callow and was riddled with something that felt like an unfamiliar shame. I wrote anthologies in secrecy and only told him that I loved him when it was late and he was surely asleep. Alone, I spoke out loud and told myself that how I felt was genuine and irrevocable until I knew the words by rote. It was easy and simple and I was courageous only when I was unaccompanied and self-assured.

The next time I told him that I loved him was just past my twentieth birthday. We lay in his dimly lit bedroom; I was leaving for school again the following morning and would not see him for a much longer time. I said it fast and unwillingly before he could stop me, and it created a ghost in the room while I was still for several minutes waiting for a response. He was quiet and unsure, mildly polite when he said, “I don’t think you do”. I left the following morning and put a small, folded poem on his pillow just as I had done since our earlier days in December. On the way out, I realized that he had saved all of my written relics in a neat pile on his bedroom shelf. I shuffled through the white lined papers of poetry and blue-inked doodles until I knew for sure that he loved me, too.

I knew that he loved me, without words, without knowing how or why and free from the binds of reciprocation. He loved me in an anomalous way, unspoken and behind the printed pages of my poetry. It was possible that nothing I had done had gone unnoticed and that maybe he, too, understood my writing and felt a similar feeling. I had mistaken a muted response as being left to linger in his bedroom alone when he loved me in darkness, blindly and solely and that itself was sufficient enough.