courage, dear heart
i try to forget you.
i try to remember you.
but i cannot.
i have written you letters,
i have sung you songs,
i have penned a thousand poems,
and it is all thanks to you.
and i wish i had not.
i would rather have you than a ghost,
hanging,
swinging in the rafters.
i do not want to replay the emotions,
the grief,
the exhaustion every july seventh
and on random days in between.
i am here and you are not.
i wonder if you would be here,
with me,
at this institute of learning,
like you said you would.
when i hear the words to that song
“this is the last night you will spend alone,”
i wonder if you thought that
when you tied that rope knot.
i wonder if you didn’t think it.
if you did think it,
would you still be gone?
it was the last night you spent alone.
but i wish you could have found another cure
for loneliness.
i wish a thousand wishes.
i write them in the sweat
that burns my eyes when i wake up
from a nightmare
or a memory.
you left,
but you made me less alone.
now i have one million,
one hundred eleven companions.
i wish i could have made you
feel less alone.
i would have gladly pointed you toward
the remedy.
hell,
i would have gladly been your cure
myself if you would have told me you were sick.
but you did not.
i guess that is why you felt alone.
three years feels like three lives,
and i do not think i have learned enough
in a day to make the time add up.
this is my wishing well.
my fingers will always throw in pennies.
every day for the rest of my life,
i will hear the quiet
plink
of another wish that cannot be unwished,
that cannot be granted.
i will always wish.
but i cannot live for wishes forever.
understand that you made your choice,
and i cannot always live
with the consequences of it.
every day,
every week,
every year,
i shed another layer
of the callouses around my heart;
i leave another scar to heal
without picking at it;
i stop examining the scars
that will grow fainter
even if they will never disappear.
you made choices for me,
choices i can never undo.
you have helped make me a person
i never thought i would be,
and even though i would trade it all,
the good and the bad,
to have you here again,
i am still grateful.
it feels sick and twisted to say that,
but somehow it is true.
i will keep writing for you for all eternity.
your absence is etched in my scars.
but i am not my scars.
i am not your absence.
i am more whole than i ever
was because i was broken.
i would have told you,
“courage, dear heart.”
but you left,
and i say these words to myself.
so i will write letters to myself,
instead.
those words are for me,
now.
even if those words
and letters
and tears would not always be for you,
anymore,
i promise you this:
they will be yours,
every year,
on the seventh of july.
i will meet you at your grave to remind you
you are not alone.
to remind me
i am not alone.
courage, dear heart.