We didn’t believe in love, did we?

A Poem about skepticism, surrender, and the quiet realization that love can conquer even those who believed they were immune to it.

ACT I — The Skeptic

We didn’t believe in love, did we?

We didn’t believe in love.
Not the kind the world exalts—
Too bright, too staged,
A trick for a cheering crowd.
It lacked the weight of truth.
It lacked the depth of us.

And yet, we took to the sea.
Out of curiosity.
For the sheer thrill of it.
Like players testing a game
Whose rules they’ve already dismissed.

Perhaps we wanted to mock the rest.
Perhaps we wanted to prove
That we were cut from a different cloth—
Free from the dreams they dared call love.

We sailed for a long time,
The waves barely a ghost beneath the hull.

Now and then, we would summon “love”
To buy ourselves some peace,
To drive away the shadows that grew too bold.

And when the tide turned against us,
We let the silence
And the distance
Do the dirty work.

Solitude was our steady shadow.
A single voice was enough to thin it out—
At least, the kind of solitude one can see.

And voices were never in short supply.

We sailed in peace,
At peace with the mirror.

And then, suddenly,
She appeared.

ACT II — The Game

She didn’t seem any different.
Not at first.
Not to us.

Just one more challenge to outrun.

We drew near with a gentle touch,
Good listeners,
Absolved of judgment—
It is simply our way.

There was no need for cold design;
Our virtues did the work for us.

And, as the hours turned to days,
She became
Yet another conquest.

A difficult one, to be sure.
She knew how to keep herself desired.

Then, bit by bit,
Like a sweet, invisible venom,
She began to seep in.

She took up space.
Then, she took it all.

Until there was nothing left
For anyone else.

And before the realization could strike,
We were no longer the victors—
But the vanquished.

ACT III — The Spell

No.
We didn’t believe in love.
And yet…
We loved her.

Deeply.

There was no one else left.

She occupied every corner.
At least, the corners that mattered.

In her hands, now,
Lies the dial of our very balance.

She made our thoughts waver.
She sowed chaos in our minds.

And like any man
Who craves what he should not,
We loved it.

We loved losing our footing.

We let ourselves be swept away.

We didn’t believe in love.
We believed in her.
In this bond.
In this thing growing between us
That had no name yet.

We weren’t naive.

We had our doubts.
Our tremors of unease.
Jealousy would knock at the door from time to time.

But we kept reciting
An ancient, ancestral wisdom:

“Sa zye pa wè, kè pa tounen.”

What the eyes do not see
Does not overturn the heart.

Innocent until proven guilty.

No, we weren’t naive.
We just knew how to play the part.

Because behind the act,
There was hope.

Very quickly, we began to map out a future.

She embodied
Everything we had always been searching for—
A kind of love the world is untaught to give.

ACT IV — The Collapse

But we weren’t ready.

Not strong enough.
Not ripe enough.

We grew complacent.
Then dependent.
Then afraid.

We let fear call the shots.

Oh, fear…
That tired, ridiculous tyrant.

And we lost our footing.

We became nothing but a shadow
Of the man we once were.
And even less
Of the man we might have become.

We were no longer man enough for her.

She held on, still.
Perhaps out of habit.
Perhaps for dread of the silence.

Or because time invested
Becomes an invisible chain.

We could feel the shift.
The air had changed.

Words became masks.
Promises, mere games.

“It’s only for a laugh.”

The breakups announced,
Then pulled back.

She called it amusement.

We called it
A warning.

Again, an ancestral wisdom:
“Se nan jwèt yo batize juif.”

The serious things
Hide behind the grin.

We spoke calmly.
Without a scene.
Trying to keep the thread from snapping.

But all the while,
We were bracing
For our own fall.

And yet, we gave of ourselves still.

But distance,
And impatience—
Those rodents of harmony.

Weariness had joined the fray.

Slowly, we began to wake.
To become ourselves once more.

To set our feet
On solid ground.

No longer complacent.
At least, not like before.

Ready to go on,
If the terms were right.

Otherwise, ready to walk away.

The feelings lingered.
Nostalgia, perhaps.
Or the dread of losing what we held.
Or the fear of the unknown.

But dignity demanded its due.

We had laid down our arms.
She, however, clung to hers,
Fanning the embers of old fires.

We no longer believed.
And yet,
We couldn’t let go.

ACT V — The Aftermath

And just as we foresaw,
She left.

For good.

We had seen it coming.
From a long way off.
We knew it would end exactly like this.

And yet,
When the moment struck,
It cut deeper
Than we cared to admit.

We had accepted it in theory.
But the void itself
Cannot be theorized.

Perhaps, deep down,
We were still holding out
For a miracle.

Absurd, of course.
We knew that.

But what can one do
Against the weight of what is felt?

There was no malice in it.
Just two souls
Arriving too early,
Or too late.

We carry no anger.
No bitterness.
Only sincere prayers.

And yet…
We still don’t believe in love.
At least,
Not the kind
The world stands to applaud.

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With clarity,
The Mirror Room
Odel A.