There is a kind of love that never fully arrives, and never quite leaves. A love that doesn’t ask to be held — only felt. These are the stories we return to, the ones that leave us hollowed and haunted, changed and awakened. The stories of unrequited love.
I’ve come to believe that what draws us to these stories is not despair, but reverence. To love someone who cannot stay, who cannot match your depth, yet still ignites your soul — that is not a failure. That is holy. That is the echo of something ancient, written into the bone memory of being human.
Unrequited love is the place where longing becomes devotion. It lives in that liminal space between what is and what could have been. It hums in the silence between words, in the heat of a touch that never happens. It is not about possession — it is about presence. About being cracked open and letting light spill in.
As Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote,
“For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks… the work for which all other work is but preparation.”
And maybe that’s why we return again to the stories of love unreturned — because they prepare us for the deeper work. They sharpen us. They remind us that love, even when not fully received, still transforms us. That even unreturned love is not wasted.
“The wind keeps what the heart cannot say — breathing passion into the grasses, memory into the trees.”
This line came to me like a whisper through the veil, and the poem that follows — A Whispered Secret — is not just about one man, or one love. It is about the way love marks us. The way it asks us to stay open. And how, even when it leaves, it teaches us something about freedom, resurrection, and the sacred rebellion of loving without needing to be understood.
Unrequited love is not a wound.
It is a poem we carry inside us —
unfinished, but eternal.
A Whispered Secret
“The wind keeps what the heart cannot say — breathing passion into the grasses, memory into the trees.”
I met him in a season of split skin,
when the earth cracked and light spilled in.
He was a blaze,
a living wound of passion,
struck hot by every collision that shaped him.
I told him stories,
of kinbaku ropes and the poems I whispered
with my wrists bound in silk ____
of lovers who carved stars into my back
and left me to dream through pain.
I told him everything.
He listened, like someone watching fire
too close,
not afraid, not brave,
just drawn.
He held both my ice and my fury
in his palms,
like riverstones warmed by sun,
trying to define the ineffable.
I was a constellation to him,
a map he wanted to fold into his chest
but didn’t know how to read.
He wanted to hold me,
but I could not be held.
He wanted my flame,
but not the ashes I rise from.
He said he loved me
in a strange and beautiful way,
the way men love what they do not understand,
tender at the edges,
containing the ache
but not the woman.
And I,
I submitted ____
not to him,
but to love itself,
which is to say
to pain,
to resurrection,
to freedom.
Because sometimes
submission is the most holy rebellion.
He couldn’t stay.
He was never meant to.
But a man who comes to you by fate
never asks for forever,
only for you to stay open
and never ____ forget.
© Gesso Cocteau 2025
