I remember how I internalized it all,
when you commanded that I not
misunderstand you, and I, not
knowing how I had done so,
took on your mantle for me,
dubbed myself incapable of
understanding or even standing
up at all, regardless of
whether I was above
or beneath.

And now that I see I have capacity,
well-earned in hard-fought journey
to surrender, I sit in silent observation
of all the misunderstood things,
loving them back to life.
I have long known all 
you misunderstood and
held it here in my heart,
then gave it back to God
where it belonged.

I see, if not face to face, then soul
to soul, the whole and not the part
of my erroneous conclusions, that
you sought to kill and condemn me,
that you would make me prisoner
to your far-reaching decree, if only
to prove falsehood as true to yourself
when you somehow decided I saw you
as a tyrant, or so she told me once,
laughing at what she saw as my naievete.
Yet, I misunderstood her, too.

And my belief that you knew
what I had lived through before was
perhaps mistaken. In that assumption
was unwitting consumption of what 
communion remained between us, if
only in the ethereal realms where all
had, to then, been well. I am sorry
for all I misunderstood, for taking
cruel words at face value, failing to see
you did not yet know the mask you wore.

Through all the years of all the others
unfriending me in your name and those times
when I thought by their choices and actions
you had sought to destroy my psyche, cared
not for all it cost me or, more importantly,
the ones I loved... for all of this I am
heartbroken for having set aside
my own love for the truth of who
you are, have ever been, will always
be to me—a king, yes, and ever a friend.