Only two more hours
Til I see you again
And what then?
How am I to begin?
Hi?
After our tragic goodbye?
Hello after watching that flame
burn out and die?
I’ll say “how’ve you been
While I’ve been away?”
After I decided it was better
Not to stay.
“How” is what I’ll say
But what I’d like to ask is
Why?
After all this time
Despite how everything ended-
When I pretended
That we would last
And then ran away-
Far and fast,
Dropped your heart of glass
Watched it shatter—
no—
I heard your laughter
And saw that the shards
were my own,
Pieces of a once-sacred home,
A safe haven burned down,
Ashes littering that holy ground.
And now you’re here
Coming back to me
After all this time.
After I’ve moved on from
That era of frantic rhymes.
I knew you’d come back-
I dreamed of it, of you,
Wondered what I’d do
If you showed up on my
Doorstep, on my campus.
I thought I’d welcome you home.
But no.
The answer is no.
I know what I’ll say:
You have no power here,
No right to my heart.
You don’t get to walk back into
My life after tearing me apart
But then you’re sitting
before me again
Asking if we can
try to be friends.
How can I say no?
I cut the tether,
But he’s not asking to get
Back together.
He just needs to know
If this is the final chapter,
If there’ll be only tears
Or another year of
carefree laughter.
He knows he has my heart
And his belongs to me—
He is the Romeo in this
Tragedy
And he knows it.
He knows that there are
Mountains between our hearts
Despite how our fingers entwine.
Despite the hundreds of rhymes
I dedicated to those first days
When our love was merely dawning.
He knows now that there is
too great a divide
between his life and mine,
Though this love
Blossomed back in may.
But that flower quickly died,
Now all he wants is a final
Goodbye,
Nearly 5 months
After we cut the tie.
“One last kiss” he begs—
But I pull away,
Saying no, not today.
Not here in the falling rain
Washing away the regret and pain,
Healing this broken chain.
So I just hold him tight,
Ask myself “Why does this
feel so right?”
And then pull myself away,
And whisper “goodnight”.
Long after I’ve fallen asleep
My phone lights up
With his message—
“Just friends”
He says.
As though we’d just
Taken a stroll down
Memory lane,
As if this pain,
All my dreams of his name,
Hadn’t resurfaced
From their exile in my mind,
Where I hid them away
To set myself free.
And when i wake
I tell him I agree.
Long after I’ve fallen asleep
My phone lights up
With his message—
“Just friends”
He says.
As though we’d just
Taken a stroll down
Memory lane,
As if this pain,
All my dreams of his name,
Hadn’t resurfaced
From their exile in my mind,
Where I hid them away
To set myself free.
And when i wake
I tell him I agree.
