lost

The shrubbery overgrew the entrance, all we would’ve let in were the weeds, the carrots and the pumpkin seeds

I wanted a happier ending, for you to look at me and say “it’s for the best”, because it was, it is, wasn’t it?

Yesterday I recalled all the reasons we were so wrong for each other

So many nights spent alone and aching, wishing I kept my damn mouth shut

A hole in the wall, a knocked over cup of tea, torn sweaters and snapped feather dusters

Here I am in your absence, fully patched walls

And I have the audacity to wonder how you are

There is an intimacy in agreeing that this would be our last time and keeping to it. Did it have to be the last time? You never meant it with her

She gets your drunk phone calls and apologies and closure, why don’t you ever call?

When is it my turn to reject you cruelly?

When is it my turn to hold power, bring out my sword of Damocles and make you pay,

I spent years dreaming and fantasising and hoping and wanting, always wanting.

I’m still reciting your phone numbers and emails, triple checking to see if you tried and weren’t about to make it through

Of course, nothing.

But who tidies your shoes for you now then? Who helps you book doctors appointments and makes your bed and cleans your laundry?

Does she leave it to soak just like you like it? Does she cut your toast into stars or squares? Who knows you like I did, like I do? Who loved you like it was their first time?

Who loves you now?

Where is the poem you wrote for me, about my room? I can sort of remember it now. About what might happen if we bumped into each other and fell in love all over again.

A gift I kept seperate, a thoughtless thing to send back. I’d give everything I had to have it now.

I still have my diaries from when you were mine

Pages and pages of unspoken words and filthy secrets, things you can never know. Things I couldn’t tell you if I tried

You chose this distance, you hand crafted a wall between us and acted like it wasn’t there

I spent my days chiselling away at the concrete, scratched up nails and hammers

Trying to make a crack so I could just see you

Just once, without the glammed and the glitz

And the round about games we played

Would you believe me if I said that I just wanted to know you, for a second

Completely. It didn’t matter to me, what kind of person you were. If you could just let me see.

How do you not know someone after knowing them truly? How do I not know your birthday, your address, your childhood bedroom? How can I see your parents out, bump into them in public, and pretend not to know who you are? How do I not know you?

What would make you laugh, what makes you cry? How do you not remember what it meant when we walked down this path and rode our bikes there, or the way you looked at me under the weeping willows leaves.

I keep you secrets closely. Only I know what you did that night at the lake, or what happened to your favourite toy. Only I can know and not unremember, not unsee our phantoms haunting our favourite spots

You are nowhere and everywhere. You have shaped me, entirely. Parts of me are so wrapped up in you, chunks of my favourite stories and movies and songs are so ingrained in us that I cannot just cut you away like an ingrown tumour, I will always take a part of me with you. Of course we’re still close.

Time passes slowly, inches away, dawdles past my eyes. Then as if set to the highest speed possible, the days blur into minutes and now we haven’t talked in years. Not a day passes where you don’t cross my mind in someway. Sometimes you burst through my bandages, my stitches and patch-up jobs, demanding to be heard and seen and loved. Sometimes I peel back the layers of skin and coax your spirit out, wary and unwilling. I ran back through the memories like an old film, rehearsing my greatest hits and the shape of your smile. I was so arrogant then, thinking we’d have this forever. Thank goodness it’s over.

So tell me now, let me in on the secret. Do you?

Do you think of me fondly? Softly? Not at all?

Does my name come up and you scowl and shriek and reveal my deepest wounds that you once licked so tenderly?

Do you see my hair or my eyes or the shape of me on a crowded street and chase after it?

Am I someone to be remembered, to be yearned for, to be missed?

Am I something that haunts your hallways and the car

Of course not. You were never one for nostalgia.

There is a litany of the unsaid surrounding us, moments over and over when you should’ve, I could’ve, we both didn’t think