Lost in Translation

Somewhere between the words I chose

and all the ones I couldn’t hold,

my heart unraveled quietly—

a language you would never see.

I tried to shape it into sound,

to place each feeling safe and bound,

but every sentence fell apart

before it ever reached your heart.

You heard me say, “I’m doing fine,”

a simple phrase, a steady line,

but hidden in its fragile frame

were storms I didn’t dare to name.

Because my voice, it spoke in ways

that drifted off like distant haze,

turning truth to something small,

until it barely spoke at all.

And you, you listened as you could,

you answered me the way you would,

not knowing every word I gave

was something I had tried to save.

We stood so close, yet worlds apart,

two different dialects of heart,

where “stay” could sound like “let me go,”

and “yes” meant things you’d never know.

I wonder if you ever heard

the weight behind each quiet word,

or felt the tremble, soft, restrained,

in all the thoughts I left unnamed.

Because I spoke in glances too,

in silences that reached for you,

in pauses longer than they seemed,

in half-formed hopes I barely dreamed.

But silence isn’t easy read,

it doesn’t say the things you need,

it hides, it bends, it disappears—

a fragile thing shaped out of fears.

So all the meanings slipped away,

misplaced in things I didn’t say,

and all the truths I tried to send

got lost before they reached their end.

And maybe I was scared you’d see

the fragile parts inside of me,

the way my voice would start to shake

with every risk I tried to take.

So I translated hurt to “okay,”

and turned my longing into gray,

I hid “please stay” inside “don’t mind,”

and buried truths I couldn’t find.

You smiled back, you thought you knew

the simple things I showed to you,

but never saw the lines between

the quiet cracks, the unseen in-between.

And maybe you were speaking too

in ways I never understood you,

maybe your silence held a plea

that just got lost on reaching me.

Because love, it isn’t always clear,

it doesn’t sound the way we hear,

it bends in tones we can’t define,

and breaks in spaces out of time.

So here we are—two souls that tried,

with so much truth we couldn’t guide,

two hearts that spoke, but failed to land

within the reach of each other’s hand.

I wish I knew a better way

to let the hidden meanings stay,

to give each word the weight it needs

to grow into what silence pleads.

But here I am, still incomplete,

with broken phrases at your feet,

offering all I couldn’t say

in fragments drifting far away.

And maybe, if you looked a bit

beyond the lines, beneath the script,

you’d see the truth I couldn’t show—

the love that never learned to grow.

Still, even now, I try once more

to speak what I have felt before,

though every word feels out of place

when meaning cannot find its space.

So if you ever think of me,

remember what you couldn’t see—

not every silence means goodbye,

not every “fine” is free of why.

And somewhere in this quiet mess,

of tangled thoughts I couldn’t express,

there lives a truth I couldn’t bend—

I loved you… lost in translation, in the end.

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