The Strangers We Have Made
The distance between who they are and who we've decided they are
We build them from the scaffolding of fear,
these people who exist inside our heads—
the colleague cold, the friend who disappears,
the lover stitched from words they never said.
We read their silence as a kind of proof,
assign them motives cut from our own cloth,
and keep our judgments sheltered on the roof
where tenderness might come and burn them off.
How strange to sit beside a living soul
and speak instead to someone we’ve designed,
to let assumption make the partial whole
and leave the actual person far behind.
What if we killed the versions that we keep
and met each other, finally, from the deep?
This is stunning. It names something so quietly human.. the way fear fills in gaps where presence asks us to stay open. That final turn feels like an invitation rather than a conclusion. A soft undoing. Thank you for putting language to the courage it takes to meet what’s real instead of what’s rehearsed.
The poem is so sensitive. These lines have stayed with me deeply -"What if we killed the versions that we keep and met each other, finally, from the deep?"