THE BIRDS AND THE BEES
(a love letter that forgets how to land)
[I. BIRDS]
You love like wings you don’t trust to land,
like “stay” and “stray” are written in sand.
Sky in your chest but you never understand
why closeness feels like a command.
You arrive like wind that refuses a home,
metonymy of motion—never alone but alone.
Every “I care” is euphemized tone,
like saying “I’m fine” when you’re turning to stone.
You don’t leave—you evaporate slow,
like distance is something you already know.
Even your silence has feathers and syntax,
flocking away from emotional impact.
You call it freedom—
I call it fracture.
[II. BEES]
I buzz in your absence, I hum in your space,
Every thought got a sting I can trace
back to your voice disappearing in pace.
I follow your silence like pollen and pain,
I could drown in your name in the rain.
Even your “maybe” rewires my brain,
like love is a language I speak in vain.
I wait for you.
I chase for you.
I break for you.
I erase for you.
But you don’t respond in the same kind of heat—
you retreat in a rhythm I can’t repeat.
I confuse your distance for something complete.
[III. THE FIELD]
And the field between us starts speaking in metaphor,
flowers arguing with the wind at the core.
The bees ask “more,”
the birds say “ignore,”
and the sky does nothing but open the door
to a language of tension, a grammar of war.
you are escape / I am pursuit
you are silence / I am pursuit
you are absence / I am pursuit
and neither of us learn the root.
your wings mean your fear
my sting means my care
and neither is fair.
[IV. LOVE ECOLOGY]
Somewhere beyond flight and buzz, there is green—
not anxious, not fleeing, not caught in between.
A love that is present but doesn’t intervene,
that doesn’t confuse pain for routine.
But we never learned that machine.
We learned:
run or remain,
cling or contain,
love or refrain.
safe in the chaos we called “romantic terrain.”
Maybe I stayed too long in your weather,
calling the storm something we could do better.
[V. COLLISION]
You fly when I reach.
I reach when you leave.
We both misbelieve.
Birds in your chest, bees in my sleeve,
nature confused on what we achieve.
We call it love but it’s harder to read
when one of us runs and the other believes
that running is something you do when you feel
too much to stay still, too real to conceal.
Even the air starts forgetting its role,
like God wrote instincts but lost control.
[VI. LOVE WAS NEVER ONE THING]
birds were never free—just afraid of the ground.
bees were never lost—just following sound.
We mislabeled survival as profound.
It wasn’t not love.
It wasn’t not real.
It just didn’t know how to feel.
You left the room and the silence and me unfinished.
[VII. FINAL]
So what are we?
Not birds.
Not bees.
Just instinct learning it cannot always agree.
Sometimes love is flight,
sometimes it’s sting,
sometimes it’s neither—just everything.
And I realize—
love isn’t what we were doing wrong.
It’s that we were both songs
written in different directions of the same longing.
I don’t think you were avoidant.
I don’t think I was too much.
I think we were both just learning
how to touch
without turning
into rush.
And somewhere in the field after noise,
birds stop fleeing.
bees stop chasing.
And for a moment—
just a moment—
love is not a question.
It is weather
that doesn’t choose sides.