erōtomania

I have been at this longer than your gods,

longer than the names you gave the stars,

and I want you to know

I have never once

missed.

Not the quiet accountant in Bruges

who walked past the baker’s window

every Tuesday for eleven years —

I put her there,

I put you there,

I angled the light.

You were hungry for the difficult ones,

the ones who made you audition,

the ones who handed you a script

and moved the goalposts

every time you learned your lines.

I watched.

I always watch.

It’s the job.

I have had cake thrown at me.

Rings.

The good china.

I have been named in depositions.

I have sat in the back of the church

while you said I do

to someone who was never

the answer to the question

you were asking.

you probably never considered,

but I had one.

Mine.

Before the quiver, before the mythology,

before I became

a punchline on a greeting card —

there was someone

who made the whole apparatus

unnecessary.

I didn’t listen either.

there was a morning I chose the sky,

I chose possibility

over staying…

and I have never forgiven myself for the arithmetic in that

I thought there would be time.

I thought love was patient

because I had read that somewhere,

but it was probably something I inspired.

So when you come to me now,

older, quieter,

buckling under the strain

of the memory of a Monday in late May

 when you let go

without knowing

the magnitude of everything you were releasing —

I’m not going to say

what you think I’m going to say.

I’m going to sit with you

in the wreckage of the obvious,

the love that was always there

like a key in a coat pocket

you stopped wearing.

I recognize this place.

I have lived here

longer than you have been alive.

And I want you to know

the baker’s window is still there.

And he still walks by every Tuesday

And the light…

the light can still be angled.