Everyone remembers when they have experienced falling,

resolutely and strictly, for one whose laughter is music,

whose words are orders and whose touch is sweet.

Someone who has painted a lively portrait of life from dull hues of grey

and has stolen your thoughts, helped you to cast the past away

and turn tentatively toward the future—the infinite tomorrow.

There is freshness in knowing that tomorrow

there will be no worry of failing, falling,

where there is always another to pull you away.

There is a rejuvenating joy in humming the tune of silent music

secretly in your heart, where the only hovering grey

cloud is fear that sourness will soon replace the sweet.

How ethereal are things that are sweet!

This is how it must feel—a forgotten soldier, given hope of tomorrow

only to be deserted, dropped, and dusted grey.

The horror when one day there is a brace and the next you are falling,

when the pounding of your frantic heart is your only music,

and suddenly the enchantment is gone, pilfered away.

The times spent together, wasting away

in our happiness—these memories are bittersweet.

For the dissonance, the disconcerting conversation, once music,

is now a haunting requiem of what we once had—a tomorrow.

It was so easy to, without realizing, begin falling

on my knees for you—I can't help but turn grey.

If we had tried harder, together we could have grown old and grey.

But what little we had we pitched away—

we got used to it. We got used to the offbeat charm, the charm of falling

too deeply in love. The addictive elation was no longer sweet,

and I felt in you the passiveness, the reluctance of empty tomorrows.

A doleful, lonely note replaced the cascading crescendo of the music.

I have reread dusty letters, replayed the old tapes of our music,

reviewed the patched and moth-eaten photographs—now fading to a hollow grey.

I see the two of us beaming, buoyant about endless tomorrows,

and now I—finally—see what I have given away.

You have followed your path, your light, your bubbly and innocent and sweet

children, and I have hoisted myself up from falling.

Who would have thought that it would be so hard to give up on falling

for you? Those warm moments for us, our music, you and your sweet

exhilaration—they were never mine to snatch away.