Nobody put it on the invoice and nobody explained—
all the things you’ll have to give away for everything you gained:
the midnight hours and the friendships that grew thin around the edges,
the conversations that you cut short standing out on all those ledges.
I paid the cost in increments so small I did not feel them,
the way you pay a long debt with the habit not to deal them,
but one day I looked backward at the distance I had covered
and counted all the personal catastrophes I’d weathered.
I am not saying it was wrong and I am not saying I regret it,
just saying that a victory has weight and I respect it—
every title and position and every summit I have claimed,
came with interest and collateral I never fully named.
The marriages of men who push this hard have a specific fracture:
where the forward motion overrides the intimate reactor,
where the person who believed in you becomes a second thing,
and the space between you quietly swallows everything.
I’m building something different now with what I understand,
holding both the acquisition and the open hand,
because the cost of conquest without conscience is a kind of ruin,
and the thing worth taking most is what you risk by just pursuing.