You were a library book with the pages glued shut

Sixteen years of abandoned backstory.

With what pivots and plot twists do to anti-climax.

You were a language I’d forgotten

A play without the final act

Like pages torn out or stopping-

mid-sentence.

 

I learned to stop asking questions

Stopped praying for repentance

When I couldn’t know what demons danced behind your eyes

Like sins and lies and sometimes I wish I could make it rhyme

Write it all out like Dr.Seuss  –

A childhood reverie that didn’t end with you, knowing how to tie a noose

Or knowing the right words to say

Or knowing too much for your age

And I can’t say I blame you

 

But I fell in love with you while you were scream-singing to ten-year-old electric pop songs

Going twenty over the speed limit

With me in the passenger seat to listen

and feel more alive than my seventeen-year-old life had ever longed to

 

And I know we all have our flaws

And that this is going to hurt before it doesn’t

That I will beat myself up, cover myself in gauze

Like a neo-American Mummy with an antediluvian concussion

 

But maybe, just maybe,

We aren’t Shakespearian tragedies writing out our eulogies in slow motion

Maybe we’re not Grimm tales told in the first person

Anticipating horror, always lurking-

When all we ever seem to make it laughter

I know you can’t promise me forever, but maybe we’ll be each other’s happily ever after.