Literally Speaking

It’s remembering the version of myself

who believed love could only happen once,

without noticing,

I became someone

who no longer measures

their life

searching the horizon

for what we’d lost

that I forgot

with every path circling back to you.

I wonder if I have wandered into your mind today,

I think about the girl I loved

when I still thought I knew enough.

She stood in the open field of us

with both hands full of hope,

while I was still learning

how to carry anything without dropping it.

I thought love was enough,

but I didn’t yet know

how to hold it gently.

Now I see her more clearly,

not as someone I lost,

but someone I once stood beside.

And I can’t decide

if it hurts more

that I didn’t know better then,

from all the places

I tried to hold you together.

And somehow

you remain untouched,

palms open,

waiting for gratitude

for every wound

you handed out

like a gift.

I do not hate easily.

But even now,

when I gather the pieces of myself,

I still find your fingerprints

I'd soften your edges,

call the fractures light

finding its way through.

I watched you split yourself open

and I expected something sacred,

but there was only hunger,

wearing the mask of depth.

Tell me,

what is it like

to stand in a room full of ruins

and mistake the wreckage

midnight drives down to the beach,

the top down on my red Jeep,

salt in the air and nowhere we needed to be.

I remember the soft way you looked at me,

like the world had finally gone quiet,

but it was just the wind

stealing every thought that wasn’t you.

I remember those early mornings,

when freedom felt effortless.

That was who I was.

Before I learned that loving you

and losing you

and for a while,

I let the heat convince me

I was whole again.

I got lost

in the wanting,

in the closeness,

the beautiful distraction.

Later,

alone in the quiet,

I realized I’d almost forgotten

It cleaned the glass.

Now I can see every crack

That I had finally learned how to live without it.

But some nights get too quiet,

and memory starts sounding like comfort.

So I answered the call again,

even knowing exactly how it ends.

Now I’m sitting with the familiar ache,

wondering why the things that ruin me

charred beams still standing out of habit.

Everything I was is coated in that bitter ash,

that no amount of time can rinse it clean.

There is no place left inside me to start over.

I just keep finding myself at alone with the feeling,

that I was just a lie you told your friends for fun.

I am left in the aftermath,

of this burned and bruised ego,

hardly settling into the shape

of what you chose to leave me as.

And then it hits me.

Even the air tastes used,

like it belonged to you first,

and I am just breathing what you left behind.

when you’ve already turned away from the sound of it,

when the words feel like knocking

on a door you won’t open,

when loving you has nowhere left to go

but stays anyway,

you start to understand

that memory isn’t a one-way mirror.

That maybe, just maybe,

when she crosses your mind,

uninvited, undeniable,