I was in pieces when you came
and began putting me back together,
piece by piece by piece by piece.
I was a puzzle whose pieces wouldn’t fit
until you came
and shifted me,
set me in place with a snap.
I need to tell you this.
No one had ever loved me before —
or not in a way I could feel.
Not feeling someone’s love
is worse
than love not existing at all.
I have served that sentence
by mutual consent.
I have imagined cutting my own veins,
gnawed through the wire of my patience,
gone without food, without sleep — even laughing —
while that so-called love
was breaking my bones.
When you came I was at the edge.
Now it is not like then,
and praise whatever gives me
the chance to write these lines,
to kneel at their feet,
to be clean
like the childhood joy
of my unborn child.
And if that child
chooses to be born
and grow,
and I am still alive
to watch it grow,
to grow old beside it,
to feel it ripen
like a peach,
to see it swell,
smelling like wild raspberries,
covered in sand,
running where I cannot run
along the shore of the sea
where I grew up,
coming back to me,
and I hold it just in time —
now, not later, not tomorrow —
there is no other eternal life
but this one.
If it is meant for us,
I want it with you, beloved.

Author & Translator: Rossen Karamfilov