ex-everything

Dear ex-everything

Sometimes I wish I could forget like you do.

All of it.

Summer nights, yellow lamplight that washed over the flowers climbing up my porch railing and blooming between our fingers

Your hand in mine, everything for the first time

Every mundane act delicious

So beautiful it was fictitious

Every single day made me believe in magic

The sweetest delusions I ever had began in spring

Forgetting all that I was

Writing poems every day

Comparing you to the ocean

The air, sunlight glistening on the first snowdrops

That secret laugh, that vulnerability

honey in our cups of tea

convincing me

That men could be kind

The worst days were behind

Imagining you were the miracle of springtime

Gershwin songs in the afternoon

And late night car drives blasting rock and roll out into the dark

Tapping feet to jazz every day

Jazz that lifted me up, made me shout and dance, made the sun come out at midnight

By the time summer came around

Teaching one another to play

Mingus on the piano had turned to promising

We’d die for each other,

Soulmates at seventeen. Right.

Great.

Seasons end.

Now you’re stone

Now you’re the certainty of snow, wind, freezing rain

This is New York

Every winter here is its own eternity

And

I mean

Seasons end.

Now you’re the classical songs I never could stand

Chaotic rhythms swirling

Notes that seem to only carry a false construct of emotion

All for show, none from the soul

If I had a penny for every lie--

whatever.

You move fast

there are new roses to sniff

New songs to play

And they’re all the same to you

There are new people to collect

To replace, to forget

You’re far away

I lose my breath, every day

I’ve never known anyone

With this remarkable, remarkable ability to forget

Thank you for letting me know

That those who know me well enough to read my soul

like a book

Will rifle through the pages and set me down, shake their head, walk out the door

If that’s what I deserve, I don’t know

But I do know

I have tabs of poems I keep open in my phone

If I want to try to feel whole

Life is fine as wine, because I am the captain of my soul, raging against the dying of the light, phenomenally, everything you could never be

A season that never dies.

I savor every last piece of me you grew to hate--

Yes, I am the girl who shouts justice over peace

Who can be unpleasant

Who goes to extremes

Addicted to assigning meaning to blank spaces

and fleeting conversation

I am the girl who asked you too many times what went wrong, yearning to understand,

trying with all my might to pull you back in again

You deem me unstable

A mess,

Too intense

And too thin a skin

Burning and collapsing, spinning too bright and hot

to hold

Too honest

And too full of hope

I just can't forget like you do.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.