They wouldn’t let me flaunt you
In front of the neighbors,
You know.
Like a childhood painting brimming
With unabashed love,
You were far too intimate to exist
Within the ordered symmetry of our home.
They said they got you, despite everything,
Of course.
You were an extension of me, however unfamiliar,
And
They said they did try to understand you,
They were supposed to understand you, after all.
(Ignoring you is almost as good as understanding you, right?)
I did the best I could, too-
I schooled myself into creating
What they thought my happiness ought to look like.
But I couldn’t quite forget you, either.
You sifted through the curtains after midnight,
Drifted cheekily along with the broken strains of a distant melody.
You snuck into brush strokes,
Into words,
Into conversations, sometimes.
This one time, I thought I’d bring you over
To the dinner table.
They’d never really met you properly before, you
Were a discarded memory
Haphazardly shoved into my closet, after all.
It wasn’t your fault,
It was never your fault.
I’m sure they would’ve tried to welcome you,
If they’d known how to,
But you were a bouquet of carnations
I’d picked somewhere, you didn’t quite belong;
They told me to put you away-
So I did.
I pretended you weren’t
The letters I unfolded and folded each night,
That you weren’t
The photographs that smiled back at me,
As I stood staring, for hours.
I got you a box of your own, you know:
Partly because I wanted
To be able to turn you into something manageable
That I could shove into forgotten corners;
And partly because I could not bear
To let them see
Portraits of you clinging
To everything
They thought I was.
It’s been some years now,
They don’t really think about you these days,
They probably believe that you got lost
Along the way, somewhere,
In the last eighteen years.
I think they’re too distant to really care.
If I brought you up with them,
They’d probably
Laugh you off to the past.
Maybe it is a good thing, after all,
That they’re too far away to know
About you, anymore.
They cannot, they will not
See you,
See us,
Anyway.
But that's okay.
At least we get to dance along
To the songs you hum gracelessly, tunelessly.
We get to wake up to each other,
To laugh, to cry,
To talk across the dinner table,
To pull out each crumpled drawing
Of us holding hands
That we’d shoved and pushed
Into boxes
Labelled ‘her’/’you’.
I’m glad I can unbox you now,
It must’ve been stifling in there.
Welcome home, it’s been lonely without you.
(prompt response to a college competition)
In front of the neighbors,
You know.
Like a childhood painting brimming
With unabashed love,
You were far too intimate to exist
Within the ordered symmetry of our home.
They said they got you, despite everything,
Of course.
You were an extension of me, however unfamiliar,
And
They said they did try to understand you,
They were supposed to understand you, after all.
(Ignoring you is almost as good as understanding you, right?)
I did the best I could, too-
I schooled myself into creating
What they thought my happiness ought to look like.
But I couldn’t quite forget you, either.
You sifted through the curtains after midnight,
Drifted cheekily along with the broken strains of a distant melody.
You snuck into brush strokes,
Into words,
Into conversations, sometimes.
This one time, I thought I’d bring you over
To the dinner table.
They’d never really met you properly before, you
Were a discarded memory
Haphazardly shoved into my closet, after all.
It wasn’t your fault,
It was never your fault.
I’m sure they would’ve tried to welcome you,
If they’d known how to,
But you were a bouquet of carnations
I’d picked somewhere, you didn’t quite belong;
They told me to put you away-
So I did.
I pretended you weren’t
The letters I unfolded and folded each night,
That you weren’t
The photographs that smiled back at me,
As I stood staring, for hours.
I got you a box of your own, you know:
Partly because I wanted
To be able to turn you into something manageable
That I could shove into forgotten corners;
And partly because I could not bear
To let them see
Portraits of you clinging
To everything
They thought I was.
It’s been some years now,
They don’t really think about you these days,
They probably believe that you got lost
Along the way, somewhere,
In the last eighteen years.
I think they’re too distant to really care.
If I brought you up with them,
They’d probably
Laugh you off to the past.
Maybe it is a good thing, after all,
That they’re too far away to know
About you, anymore.
They cannot, they will not
See you,
See us,
Anyway.
But that's okay.
At least we get to dance along
To the songs you hum gracelessly, tunelessly.
We get to wake up to each other,
To laugh, to cry,
To talk across the dinner table,
To pull out each crumpled drawing
Of us holding hands
That we’d shoved and pushed
Into boxes
Labelled ‘her’/’you’.
I’m glad I can unbox you now,
It must’ve been stifling in there.
Welcome home, it’s been lonely without you.
(prompt response to a college competition)
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