I Want You To Stay

When met with poetry about lost love,
I want to hug the writer and tell her it will be okay.

Eventually.

It will get better, I’d say
You will find your closure, I’d add.

My god, he took forever to get out of my system
We collided in summer and loved in autumn.

There were evident post-breakup signs
Like no appetite,
or my tears running recklessly,
like a broken faucet
I’d listen to sad Vanessa Carlton songs on my walks to the campus, to the bus.

“I know it’s been so long
I can’t ever seem to forget
All it takes is a song
And I could swear I hear your steps
Down the hall that goes up past
That leaves an ache that’s never left
‘Cause I gave you my best.”

When I moved on,
I allowed others to use my body for their pleasures,
while I pined for another chance
But I shoveled down the opposing truth;
that I was not ready.

Two and a half years marked the end of our ellipsis;
he came back to finish our story
To finish what was left undone
To finish what we started all that time ago,
when we were teenagers, needing love to swallow us whole.

We were never meant to be a happy ending
We were fireworks on the Fourth of July,
always fated to beautifully explode.

And then you came.

We fell in summer and loved in autumn
We burned bright, but not too bright
Not the kind that inevitably ruptures
Into nothing.

Not the kind where autumn is our pleading attempt to last through winter.

I do not want us to be a poem about lost love
I do not want us to be the closure that spans the years.

I do not want that
I do not want that
I want you to stay.