I fell in love with you

in a room like this one

with blue carpet cut-offs

and cabinets full of china and bone

and other people’s stolen things.

I fell in love with you

while you were pushing your glasses up with one hand,

talking about grappa with the other,

golden trinket display light in your eyes.

And I want to say I loved you

like I’d never been hurt, but

that wasn’t it. I loved you

like I had been, and held on

fiercely, to everything I needed you to be.

But maybe after all, it was just words.

Another script repeating,

the same lines you’ve used on an entire list of women

you won’t tell me the length of.

And, like your grandfather felled a forest

to get your grandmother through the winter,

now you tell other girls how their voice-memoed moans

could get you through a war.

And that’s what it feels like now,

don’t you think?

Like you were meant to stay awake for

this shift so we weren’t ambushed in the night

but instead I watched you sleep, unbothered,

as a million missiles landed around me and shrapnel

pierced my skin.

My china, my bones, my things that you stole.

Because if it’s this easy for you,

everything I’ve ever thought must be true,

and I’m not special,

and I didn’t set your world on fire,

and I wasn’t the fifth element after all,

and,

just as the devil on my shoulder always told me,

your life is better without me in it.

I just wish I could get that Nick Cave song out of my head.

Because I still have my unused Pinterest board

and unspoken vows saved to a file marked:

‘Me, falling in love, with you’,

and there’s no street I wouldn’t have followed you down

and there’s no rules I wouldn’t have obeyed

to be a good Witness-adjacent girl, except

for that one party where booze and dancing weren’t allowed

and I embarrassed you by partaking in both.