What The Light Left Behind Poem by Ruby Gitonga

I used to think love was a lantern
something you carried into dark rooms
and everything softened where it touched.

Now I know it's more like weather:
it arrives without asking,
rearranges the furniture of your certainty,
and leaves before you've found
the right thing to say back to it.

I keep the photographs anyway.
Not because I miss the hands in them,
but because I miss believing
that hands could be trusted
to stay open.

There's a particular kind of quiet
that comes after you stop expecting the door.
It isn't peace. It isn't grief either.
It's the sound of a person
learning to fill their own doorway.

I don't regret the loving.
I regret how long I mistook
being needed for being chosen,
how I confused the ache of waiting
with the proof of something real.

Love, when it's honest, doesn't promise permanence.
It only promises now.
I just wasn't told that
until now was already over.