after you

After you, I decided I’d never date a writer again. 

No one who would hug, yes really, literally, hug the giant trees all around campus, oblivious to the people around him. Never again would I date a writer, someone who would grow wheatgrass in his dorm room, in tiny, smelly containers, and shout, fearless and humiliating across the quad I love you Jessica while I was walking with somebody else, someone who had just taken me to dinner.

Your brilliance was captivating, to be sure. But your insanity, even more so.

I still have all your letters, your poems, that soliloquy you wrote for me about Orleans, the summer we spent, that magical one, the kind that lives on in your mind, contained, like a locked wooden box, because it’s a place you can go to remember what innocence was like. Once in a while, every few years or so, I read them. They are sad. You made me out to be something I never was.

I was never a person. I was just another poem in your mind.

You once locked me in a room when I was seventeen and you were twenty. And you said, nothing but bathroom and water breaks, because you were going to teach me.

If you can get there yourself, you can get there with me, you said.

At the end of the long afternoon, I cried from frustration, partly at you, partly at myself.

I just can’t.

Yes you can.

No I can’t.

We were sweaty with the sun sinking into the horizon, so sweaty and your mom was going to be home soon. We’d hear her car, wouldn’t we?

I was your prisoner. But I didn’t want you to let me go.

I needed to let me go. But when I let go, you held on. And on. You made me afraid. You were writing me. All the time.

When we were together, I was just words forming poems, and you saw past me. You saw past everyone. Everything was a poem for you.

I was in your wedding. Years later. A bridesmaid. I loved your wife, too. It was strange for everyone but us. I’ll never forget late at night in the wedding tent, hours later, after we all took too many pictures, pictures I never got to see. It was such a beautiful wedding, so dramatic in the endlessness of the Catholic church, echoic and haunting, foreboding even, and the reception at your parents house, the backdrop of the Berkshires in the distance, the shimmering water, and your new wife. No one was ever more beautiful. You had everything.

But everything was only words.

Where did your words go?