LEAVE ME BUT DON'T GO - by Precious Samuel

Sometimes I want you close. Close enough to hear you breathe, to borrow your calm when my mind is loud. In those moments, your presence feels like shelter. Close enough to hear the quiet things you don’t say out loud. Other times I need distance. Not because you did something wrong, but because closeness, for me, turns toward the old scar I haven’t shown you. I go quiet. I step back. I need air that doesn’t have anyone else in it. I can’t explain it in a way that sounds tidy. There’s no flowchart. It’s just this: parts of me were built in rooms where love meant surveillance, or where needing someone meant risk. So when you get close, an old alarm goes off. When you step back, a different one rings — the one that says, “Everyone leaves.” I don’t want something intimate with you. Not the kind you might be thinking of. Not right now. Maybe not ever. But I’m afraid of losing you to someone else, to someone who can give you the version of closeness you deserve. I know it’s confusing when I still reach for you in other ways. Yeah, I know how that sounds: selfish, contradictory, unfair. I know it, and I still feel it. There are some things I want: - The need to be untethered, to know I can exhale without anyone tracking my air. - The need to know you’re not gone, that my distance didn’t erase me from your mind. I’m not asking you to wait forever. I’m not asking you to decode me like a riddle. I’m just telling you the truth while I have the words: I orbit. I come near, I swing wide. The gravity is still there even when I’m at the far edge. If you stay, know that my silence isn’t absence and my presence isn’t a promise. If you go, know that I’ll understand, and that understanding will still hurt. I don’t want to possess you. I don’t want to be consumed. I want the impossible: to be free and to be kept. To be alone and to not be abandoned. That’s the line I walk. That’s the 6:30 of us — not day, not night. A peak that’s also an in-between. It doesn’t last. Love isn’t a switch. It doesn’t vanish the second I need space, and it doesn’t magically appear the second you’re next to me. It’s there, even in the quiet, even when I’m bad at showing it. I wish I could draw you a map: “Here’s where I panic, here’s where I settle.” But I don’t have that map yet. I just have the feeling, and the feeling says: come here / no, not too close / don’t go. The thought of you giving your softest parts to another person makes my chest go tight. I want the safety of knowing you’re there, without having to meet the price of full intimacy. I want to keep you, without being fully kept. I see the contradiction. Naming it doesn’t fix it, but at least I’m not lying to you. My distance is not rejection. It’s regulation. My closeness is not a promise of more. It’s just what I can give in that moment. I’m scared — of losing you, and of losing myself if I force something I’m not ready for. I don’t want to chain you here. If staying hurts you, you get to choose you. If you do stay, know this: I’m working on the map. I’m learning the difference between space and abandonment, between closeness and being consumed. I don’t need you to fix this. I just need you to not punish me for telling the truth. And I need to hear your truth too: can you live in this in-between with me, or does it cut you? That’s where I am. Not day, not night. And I’m still here.

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