It did not seduce me.
It understood me.
It waited where my defenses were already thin,
where love had once lived
and left its outline behind.
I recognized it immediately.
That was the cruelty of it.
There is no innocence in knowing
and stepping closer anyway.
Temptation spoke in my own voice.
It borrowed my logic,
wore my doubts like borrowed skin,
and asked nothing I had not already considered.
It did not promise happiness.
It promised relief.
An end to the labor of resisting
the ache I kept dignified by calling it restraint.
Love, I learned, does not always arrive as hope.
Sometimes it comes as permission
to stop pretending you are whole.
I told myself this was choice.
I told myself this was clarity.
But clarity can be a blade
that cuts cleanly through consequence.
Every thought turned toward you
with a quiet inevitability,
the way gravity never announces itself
yet never fails.
I felt myself hollowing
before I felt myself falling.
Conviction eroded,
not violently,
but tenderly,
until there was room enough
for desire to sit beside my fear.
This was not passion.
It was recognition of my weakest truth.
That I wanted what would undo me
more than I wanted to remain intact.
Love did not push me.
It watched.
It let me cross the line alone
so I could never call it an accident.
And when I surrendered,
it was not because I believed I would survive,
but because some part of me
was tired of surviving without you.
© Ifedolapo Ogunniyi
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