An Ode To A Fatherhood Forgotten In Frowns

They say love makes life.

But they never tell you what love makes

after life has been denied its chance to begin.

A man. A woman.

Madly, passionately, recklessly in love —

the kind of love that laughs at menstrual calendars and ovulation cycles

and tells caution to go fuck itself.

She gets pregnant.

By mistake?

By miracle?

By whatever word you use

when protection fails but poetry doesn’t.

A love child —

not the kind born out of a guilty affair 

or an indulgent whorehouse

not the kind that smells of scandal

but the kind born out of a love so stupidly sincere,

you almost believe the world will forgive it.

Spoiler:

It doesn’t.

The families —

they do what families do best.

They turn funerals into courtrooms

and judge you for crimes

they wrote the commandments for.

They called him names:

pervert, predator, mistake.

Said he defiled her.

As if love was a weapon.

As if he wasn’t the one

clutching the hospital railing,

asking if he could just see her

before they wheeled her in

to kill the only proof they ever existed in each other.

They aborted the child.

Not out of choice,

but because her hemoglobin was too weak

to carry both blood and blame.

And he —

he wasn’t even allowed in the room.

Love might have made the child,

but shame signed the paperwork.

She bled.

He broke.

And no one talked about the part

where he waited outside,

holding on to a name

they never got to argue over.

No one mentions the part

where he left the hospital

less a man, more an orphaned father

with no gravestone to mark his grief.

It wasn’t the abortion that gutted him.

It was the excommunication.

Being shamed by the woman

he almost built a life inside of.

Not because she stopped loving him —

but because it was easier to call him a mistake

than to admit

that the world makes monsters

out of men who love women before marriage

and don’t apologise for it.

And now?

Now, some nights,

he pulls open a drawer

and stares at a pregnancy stick

like it’s a ticking clock —

not one that measures life,

but one that froze

the moment society hit pause

on his right to feel.

He holds it up against the light —

as if time could be reversed

by sheer ache alone.

As if love

could outlive

what the world is too cowardly to name.