“You make it look like it’s magic
Cuz I see nobody (nobody) but you.
I’m never confused; I’m so used
to being used.”
— The Weeknd
You were almost the One
who got away.
I drove by the site
of our biggest fight, today
six times, in coming and going
to an event I was DJing.
Last night, I shared with you
how I had fallen in love with you
all over again. How who you are
and who you’d been for days (and months)
was the single woman I had ever fully trusted
to take my heart and to guard it
in your hands.
The single woman I believed
truly loved me. Wanted me. Believed in me.
And chose me.
I stared at the alleyway in which I’d hid
that day, so others wouldn’t hear me yelling
or crying, or see me chainsmoking on a smokeless
campus. I looked at the tree where I’d leaned
to support the weight of knowing
it was all about to end.
Everything I’d believed.
The You I had believed
to exist crumbling inside my mind
like the shatter-less vase you realized
you’d paid too much for when it slips
from the counter and does, indeed, sha
tter
into plastic pieces.
That belief:
Love at first sight.
I can still see you on the loveseat
that first day. When our eyes met
and everything, everything
in my life finally made sense.
Like a bell ringing somewhere unseen.
Like the guts of a lock with its tumblers
clicking into place. I knew,
right then and there,
for better or worse,
the rest of my life
was in your dark,
elegant hands.
Driving home that night,
I prayed. I confessed. I told our God
(the one I hadn’t talked to in years)
that if it wasn’t you, if you hadn’t felt it too—
I would never believe again.
It was too much. It was too much
and at first sight.
Today, I looked at that alley
and that tree, six times, and I stared
into the eyes of a reality that almost
was given breath. That almost
rose up and ripped out and tore us
apart, believing it had all been
a worthless fantasy.
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”
“So quick bright things come
to confusion.”
“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever;
it’s loveliness increases; it will never
pass into nothingness”
“Nothing gold can stay.”
The voices of the great romantic writers
are the voices we, ourselves, speak
in clichés, like when we say:
If you love something
let it go.
We almost let it
all
go.
There, in that alley way,
by that tree, everything
I believed (I believe)
was almost erased.
My prayer, as we say goodnight
tonight, is that we would never
forget. That we would never
not see, not believe, never
let go of what we know
to be fact.
And that, just as every cliché
became a cliché, because
one person experienced it
and said it, and others
recognized themselves
in it, and still others
repeated it, whether
or not they believed it,
until the words were
tarnished and lost
all meaning…
Our testimony would remain
when everything else has gone
and the words no longer matter.
Our love would remain
when everything else has failed
and words are no longer
necessary:
Our hands would hold.
Our eyes would see
just as we saw
at very
first sight.
* Text in quotes are, in order, from William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 & A Midsummer Nights’ Dream, John Keats’ Endymion, and Robert Frost’ Nothing Gold Can Stay. The other italicized phrases are cliches. And true.*
