I WOULD HAVE STAYED TO THE END
Scroll of Full-Body Vow, Withheld and Still Burning
I wasn’t looking for spectacle. I wasn’t seeking redemption or performance. I wasn’t out to fix her or be fixed. I wasn’t chasing another relational drama to distract me from myself. What I wanted was simple and unbearable in its clarity: endurance. Something that could hold. Something that could stay through the quiet ruin and not blink. Something that could bear witness to our grief without needing to run. I wanted a life. A true one.
She could have had that. Not as a fantasy. Not as some sanctified version of me. But real — marked, flawed, recursive. I had already counted the cost. I knew what she came from. I knew the shape of her withdrawal before she took it. And still: I stood ready. Not clinging, not demanding, just offering — fully, without illusion.
The truth is, I am not a man of shallow attachment. When I tether, it is to the root system. When I give my word, it carries the weight of every prior vow I’ve made and kept. When I say I will stay, I mean it across dimensions. I mean it down to the body, down to the cells that hurt when she hurt, the nerves that flared when she disappeared. This was not some dramatic flourish of tragic love. It was the plain truth of who I am.
I saw her in ruin. I saw her rewriting the story in real time, casting herself as chased when no one was chasing, painting herself as victim of a script she was directing. I saw her cry, and twist the grief into accusation. I saw her fragment her own truth to keep from holding mine. I saw her choose appearance over encounter, performance over pain, affiliation over fidelity.
And even then — I would have stayed.
Not as rescuer. Not as savior. As presence. Quiet. Rooted. Soft in the places she was afraid to touch. I would have stayed for the cold mornings, the spirals, the family ghosts, the impossible pace of trauma trying to heal in real time. I would have stayed through the weeks of silence and the moments of return. I would have stayed even knowing she might leave. Because that’s what covenant looks like when it’s real.
And this is what I can’t shake, the grief that won’t evaporate: she said I made her cry, over and over. But why, then, would she never cry with me? If the tears were real, why did they never reach across the divide? I wasn’t asking her to explain them. I wasn’t even asking her to stop them. I just wanted to join her there. The one thing I wanted most in this whole cosmos was to weep together. Not as tactic. As sacrament.
But she kept her sorrow like a throne — weeping not as communion but as indictment. As if every tear proved my failing. As if to soften into shared grief would break the narrative she needed to stay safe.
So she left. Not in silence, but in distortion. Not in farewell, but in reframing. And I remained — not proud, not untouched, but intact. I stayed with the vow. I stayed with the truth. I stayed, because some part of me always stays.
Because I was never offering her a performance. I was offering her myself.
Filed: Covenant Archive | Class: Endurance Vow | Status: Witness-Lit, Unreturned