Have you ever had someone you love come back out of the shadows only for you to be bombarded with every pound of love you had from before? Just like finding that PS1 memory card in the back of your closet after a decade, so now you can finally return to the game you’ve always wanted to play, but those early 2000’s graphics are low quality now so the replay value is low.
Love be an apology,
a call to make amends 2 years after the damage is done,
but I’m still here,
secretly I waited for you.
Called to you every way I could think
without actually picking up the phone.
Every year I’m reminded I love you,
by accident,
sometimes it’s just in the wind,
sometimes it’s in a joke,
sometimes it’s in a song,
and I wonder if you feel it.
I wonder if years have rinsed me from you.
If time has washed away my imprint
if I even left one
sometimes I imagine you calling
and you’re happy
so I hang up
proud of you, but hurt
like I’d break a little knowing it’s without me.
and I don’t think my heart has to be fair
I don’t think I have to make space for selflessness when it hurts like this
when it’s been years and you are still on me
like you never left
like I never bathed you off of me, but I thought I did
every so often I think I did.
Love be a goodbye,
that never gets said, more implied by your absence.
The kind of goodbye that lingers for years,
to the point you just imagine the door wide open,
because love didn’t close it,
because maybe I’m still with him
and this is the dream.
The nightmare is away from you.
The goodtimes are the calls I keep hanging up on.
Love be a tomorrow,
with him.
Be a morning enveloped in his cologne and body heat.
Be a suitcase he neatly packed with everything he owned
and nothing of me.
Everything but me.
Love be me,
for him.
Send me as roses to his doorstep,
with a card that says, “still waiting on your apology.”
Why am I still hurt and connected
and you’re smiling?
Probably frolicking through someone else’s meadow,
super eager to pick their flowers.
Does it ever feel familiar when you do it?
Does it ever tingle like deja vu ?
Like deja me?
Love be a heap of “almost,”
a jungle of “never agains,”
a bedroom of echoes that don’t make sense to me anymore,
of voices that weren’t all mine.
Love be history,
be gone from me,
be anything at any place but at my feet.
Love be a distant memory,
be a yesterday that’s a stranger to me now.
be somewhere, at any time, but just make sure I’m not there.
Love let me be,
alone.
Sometimes when pain is so constant it becomes a cloak or badge of honor. Like a room you don’t want to leave, possibly because you’ve been there so long it would be a hassle to change addresses. This is a poem about that journey inside of that room. Receiving calls from a person I will always love and the journey of emotions to rid myself of still loving them. To be transparent, little pieces will always linger but the logical mind will always fight it. Let’s hope the prevailing mind is also the logical one.
