Full Circle

This poem records a literal full-circle moment.

725 days after going with someone I loved to see one of my favorite artists perform—on a night when our relationship first seemed to open toward something more—I returned to the same theater to see that same artist 25 days after the relationship finally ended.

This time, I arrived with a close friend and heard parts of my own heartbreak reflected through someone else's love story.

The place was the same.

I was not.

The poem holds the strange gratitude of returning to a beginning after reaching its end, able to love what happened without needing to return to it.

This poem documents one of the most literal full-circle moments I have ever experienced.

725 days earlier, I sat amongst the crowd in the Paramount Theater watching one of my favorite artists, Alok Vaid Menon, perform live—the first live show of theirs I'd had the pleasure to attend.

I brought someone I was already in love with.

Afterward, we got gelato and walked for miles around downtown Denver, talking late into the night about our histories, wounds, dreams, and desires. Somewhere during that walk, our conversation opened into the possibility of exploring a deeper intimacy together.

I remember how hopeful I felt.

Twenty-five days before writing this poem—700 days after that first night—the relationship finally ended.

Then I returned to the same theater.

“To wind up back where you started
Re-arriving as yourself
But not the same one
Who arrived before”

That is what a full-circle moment feels like to me.

The circumstances rhyme, but the person encountering them has changed.

There is something almost impossible about the precision with which life can occasionally arrange those moments. Whether they are actually arranged by anything beyond coincidence, I don't know. But sometimes the symmetry itself becomes meaningful.

That night, Alok told a story about love and heartbreak that felt uncannily familiar.

“And my body ached recognition
Like a couplet meeting
It's rhyming petition”

I like the image of rhyme here because two things do not need to be identical in order to resonate.

Their story was not mine.

But something in it rhymed.

And through that resonance, I heard reflected back something I had been painfully learning myself:

“That the only way
To find greater love
Is to choose not to settle
Clinging onto what is less—
What cannot meet you”

That was an extraordinarily difficult lesson for me.

The relationship contained real love.

That is important.

I don't need to diminish what existed between us in order to acknowledge what did not.

We loved each other, and we repeatedly failed to meet each other in the ways each of us needed.

For a long time, the existence of love itself made leaving feel almost impossible. If the love was real, surely there had to be some configuration in which we could finally make the relationship work?

But love and relational compatibility are not the same thing.

Sometimes honoring love requires acknowledging what it has not or cannot become.

The first night in that theater was followed almost immediately by an event of horrific violence that affected me deeply. I documented this event in the poem Shock.

Looking back, the juxtaposition is difficult not to notice: extraordinary hope followed within minutes by intense shock.

When Alok spoke during the second performance about the different ways people interpret omens, I found myself wondering about that beginning:

“Perhaps a primal instinct
Might have suggested
The utter shock
Observed mere minutes
After this elating agreement
Was far more prescient
Than coincident”

I don't know whether I believe it was an omen.

I don't need to decide.

But retrospectively, the sequence carries a symbolism that would have been impossible for me to recognize that night.

What followed was nearly two years of tremendous love alongside tremendous instability.

The relationship repeatedly approached greater commitment and then retreated from it. Hope returned. Things broke down. We tried again.

And through those cycles, I repeatedly confronted the difference between loving someone and abandoning myself in order to preserve access to that love.

That is why these lines feel so important:

“And then you realize
The only way
To stop it from suffocating
Is to remove your hands
From your own throat”

There is something deliberately uncomfortable in that image.

I had experienced the relationship's inability to become what I wanted as something being done to my heart.

But eventually I had to confront the ways I was participating in my own suffering by continuing to hold onto something that repeatedly demonstrated its limitations.

Letting go did not mean the love had failed.

It meant I could no longer use love as justification for betraying myself.

That distinction connects this poem directly to so much of what I was writing during this period: Done, The Weight, Sole-mate, New Rules, Resistance, and Betrayal all circle different parts of the same realization.

By the time I returned to the theater, I had finally acted upon it.

And I did not return alone.

“I brought someone with me
Tonight as well
A best friend
Who knows my story
Who stood with me through it”

I find that detail increasingly meaningful.

The first time, I arrived with the person around whom so much of my hope would become organized.

The second time, I arrived with someone whose friendship had already demonstrated itself through presence.

Someone who had watched me struggle to accept that I deserved more than what the relationship could offer and continued reminding me anyway.

The circle did not close in isolation.

I was accompanied by a different expression of love.

That matters.

So does the gratitude near the end:

“I am grateful to he
Whom I still love
Who told me so as well
Even though we both know
It was not for us to find together”

There is no villain required for this ending.

There was hurt. There were failures. There were choices on both sides that caused pain.

But there was also love.

And one of the strangest parts of reaching the end was recognizing that we could both believe the other deserved the kind of love they wanted while finally accepting that we could not reliably provide it for each other.

That is profoundly bittersweet.

The poem doesn't resolve that bitterness by extracting the sweetness from it.

It braids them:

“My heart is braided
With bittersweet gratitude
For all the love
And all the pain”

I think that image may describe the emotional center of the entire poem.

Gratitude does not erase grief.

Love does not erase incompatibility.

Pain does not erase love.

An ending does not erase what preceded it.

They become strands of the same history.

And I think that is why I could return to the same place 725 days later and experience it differently.

I had not escaped the story.

I had lived through it.

The person who first entered that theater could not have known what those next 725 days would contain. The person who returned carried all of them.

Then Alok ended the show with words that landed with almost impossible precision:

“I have never loved you more”

That is where the circle closes for me. Because after everything that happened, I still loved him—still love him.

In some ways, perhaps more fully than before.

But that love no longer required me to turn it into a future it could not sustain.

I could love him and let the relationship be over.

I could love what we shared and acknowledge what it cost.

I could be grateful for who I became through knowing him without pretending I needed the pain in order to become that person.

And I could want greater love for both of us, even knowing we would have to find it elsewhere.

That feels like a different kind of love than the one with which I entered that theater the first time.

Less possessive.

Less dependent upon possibility.

More capable of allowing reality to be what it is.

The circle closes in the same theater, with the same artist, carrying love for the same person.

But I am not the same person carrying it.

And perhaps that is what makes the final statement possible:

“I have never loved you more”

Not because I am holding on.

Because I finally know how to let go.