We Can Run On Love For A While

Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch (trans. Gregory Rabassa)

knowing there may come a day

where your name lives only in silence,

where we become strangers

who remember too much.

And the worst part is

I know you miss me.

I know there are moments

you reach for me in your mind

before you remember

you chose not to.

But pride is a quiet prison, isn’t it?

One word

I’m sorry,

sits heavy on your tongue,

too honest,

too exposing,

too real.

So you stay where you are,

convincing yourself

it’s easier to carry the weight

than to admit you dropped it.

And I see you.

More clearly now than I ever did before.

All the things you couldn’t say,

all the ways you folded into yourself

I understand them now.

I just wish you had let me in.

Because I never really left.

Not the way you think.

I stayed

in patience,

in silence,

in all the space you never filled.

And if you had turned around,

even once,

I would have been there.

Still loving you.

Still choosing you.

Still willing to try again

like nothing ever broke.

But you didn’t.

So now I stand at a distance,

learning how to let you go

without ever really releasing you

watching a life I’m no longer part of,

hoping, foolishly,

that tomorrow