the love poem of all love poems

Lately, all my poems seem to be about you and while I write them, I find myself wishing upon the stars. My reoccurring wish is for the day you will hear my poems, hear me, if only one more time.

But truthfully, I know it sounds more like a prayer that begs for the day we will meet again.

That in fact, yes, all my shooting stars might have been wasted on not only hoping that our paths will cross again, but that this time, just maybe, we might get it right.

My wishes change every now and then, something that is completely dependent on whether it is a good or bad day.

On the good days, I wish for another chance. I wish to go back to that winter night we spent together in your bedroom. The lights were off, the world felt still even as the snow fell heavily outside. I wish to never let go of that memory and the bittersweet way the visual unravels itself like the most beautiful movie in my head. We had been sitting on your bed. Well, you had been sitting on your bed and I was sitting on you, and even thinking back on it now, I still get butterflies. You were holding me, looking up at me with a look so full of something I had never seen before.

You looked at me like I was magic and kissed me like you had ached lifetimes for it. You compared my lips to clouds. The way you kissed me was something I felt all the way down to my toes, buzzing in my fingertips and brought the kind warmth that washed over my entire soul. The strings of my heart tugged at the way you grabbed at my face, fingertips grazing my skin like I was something precious to explore and your eyes wandering, searching, admiring my face.

On the good days, I wish to feel all of that again because my brain, my body, my soul cannot seem to forget it.

However, it is almost a vicious cycle. Remembering moments like that is what creates the bad days, which changes my wishes entirely.

On the bad days, I wish it all never happened and that we never even met at all. I wish I could stop collecting memories of you like people collect seashells or coins, similarly, grasping at them as if they remain my most prized possession. I wish to forget the way you looked at me because it makes me feel sick. Because I truly know I have never been looked at that way before and I am terrified I will never be given that again.

When sleep seems impossible, the moon and I speak of you often. She hears me cry into the darkness of my room and illuminates the depths of my pain like she does the night sky.

I tell the moon that when we met, my gravity shifted. I tell her that my world has not been the same since and that every time I walk, I still feel the remnants of the damage you left in the soles of my feet. They burn and ache with something that feels like I have spent too much time chasing after a you that has come and gone all too quick.

I tell the sky that you were never perfect to me. Never once.

In fact, when we first met, you were very clearly broken.

The scars you carried were not evident to the average person, but I recognized the heaviness in your eyes from a mile away. That was the first thing I noticed about you. The fact that your eyes seemed to carry stories, novels of pain and hurt that my fingers itched to open and trace the pages of.

I tell the stars I know I should stop wasting wishes on boy who never gave a fuck about the girl who would have done anything for him.

The stars and the sky listen to my sadness, my sadness apparently so potent and tangible, that they feel it from galaxies away. The stars appear one after the other and sigh wistfully at me. The only sympathy the sky seems to offer is that of making sure the heavens pour down as much water to match the tears that endlessly pour out of my eyes.

The moon, however, seems to empathize with me with the type of ease that sounds like it comes from a lifetime of experience of dealing with devastation and misery.

The moon tells me that I am not the first to want something I know I cannot have.

I tell her that I know I am not the first to have my heart break viciously into two and that I will certainly not be the last. I tell her in between sobs that I do not want you. That the only thing I want is some fucking answers to a whole lot of questions.

I want to know why I still think about you first thing in the morning, memories of us flashing in my mind at random, and constantly haunting my dreams. I need to know why the thought of you tracing patterns into my skin keeps me up at night, and that my recurring nightmare is the reality of me still somehow searching for your face in the crowds of random people.

I do not want to care for you.

Why the fuck should I care for the boy who told me he was scared to fall in love with me? Who did not even bother to try and stay, but instead broke my heart into a million pieces and ran away? I tell the moon the only thing I care to know is why when it comes down to you, despite all odds, even though you fucked my best friend, even though you did not want to fight with me, for me and instead found something I could not give you in other women, that despite all of that, I still hope for something, anything when it comes to us.

I tell the moon that I thought I had outgrown this feeling. I tell her that I feel pathetic, useless, and weak and want answers to why I am still that same little girl who apologizes excessively, wants the ones who never want her back and clings to bad habits like they set me free, rather than hold me down.

Instead of answering me, the moon tells me about the sun, her first and only true love. She tells me about the tragedy of how they spend the majority of their lives apart, only to both long for the rare moments they share together in the sky.

She tells me that the sun is the most beautiful thing she has ever encountered yet remains the most painful thing of all. That it almost hurts to look at him, let alone think of him constantly.

The moon laughs something bright and bold at me calling myself pathetic, useless, and weak. The moon tells me how she begs gravity every night to roughly pull at the tides of the ocean just for the slight chance that in the morning, the sun will see traces of her left upon the sand. Just to remind him that she exists.

Brokenly and at the end of my wits, I ask the moon the secret to loving someone you can never be with, I ask the moon how she lives with it, how she copes.

The moon tells me that no matter how heartbroken the two of them are at being apart, they still shine every day and night. Because above all, they love themselves more, they know they serve purpose in this life, that we all individually serve a purpose in this life and I would be wise to never forget it.

I will not forget it.

I cannot forget it.

However, I also cannot seem to forget the way you moved on before I could even blink. In fact, sometimes I wonder if you even ever really felt anything for me at all, or if I was just the doormat you wiped your boots of pain and frustration clean with.

It is ridiculous that I even still care for you, that you have me straight up having conversations with the moon, sky, and stars. It is ridiculous that I somehow still manage to set up a plate for you every night on the table that is my heart. That somehow, somewhere, you sneaked yourself into the temples of my mind, my body like a house, filled with photographs and parts of you on the walls that I cannot seem to erase.

Perhaps it just goes to show that no matter how many times you have hurt me, I am still like this poem I read long ago by an unknown author. It tells the story about the little girl who always over waters her plants because she does not know when to stop giving.

That love poem inspired me to write my own love poem.

To write the love poem of all love poems.

Because, I do not love micro doses, increments or anything that can be a measurement considered small. The way I love spreads far and wide like the oceans. The way I love is endlessly deep and full of things human beings have yet to discover.

But guess what?

I am so tired of my heart holding on to you. I am exhausted. My heart is exhausted from carrying the weight of this wound. I can no longer carry this burden alone.

So I decided to write you this poem.

Before this poem, I had been experiencing the worst writer’s block of my life. No matter how many times I tried to create something, it all never felt right. I avoided writing about you, about the way you made me feel because I thought to myself: fuck you.

You already invaded every other aspect of my life. Why should I let you be my muse when you were already the fucking ghost that always haunts me, taunts me when I try to love others, and daunts all the others who try to love me.

But I could not write anything with that type of avoidance.

For the first time in forever, instead of trying to pick up the broken pieces of myself on the ground, I laid down on the sharpest pieces and reminded myself what it feels like to bleed.

What it feels like to feel.

Because you see, after you, something in me shifted.

You broke my fucking heart.

That heartbreak changed me forever and something in me hardened.

Before you, I used to worry endlessly that I would never find anyone who would make me feel the way I want to feel. The type of love that I search for in the novels I read and the songs I play.

After you, I found that despite the endless of people who want me, who fall in love with me, who fucking beg me to be their person over and over again, I realized that my heart had officially turned cold.

I wanted none of them, at least not consistently, at least not enough.

I began to be the one to break hearts and it did not leave me feeling victorious in the way I thought it might.

My old fear of the possibility that I may never have someone love me morphed into something new.

The fear became that I may never consistently yearn for someone the way I still do you.

And then I remembered that there was most certainly a time before you, a me that existed before you entered my life and that this little girl’s first love was writing poetry.

Poetry was and still is everything to me. Writing is my true soulmate. Writing and the ability to write is something I have done before I even received my first kiss. Writing has seen me through so many things, and it has been there for me more than any lover, friend or family member I know. Writing broke my heart before you ever could and put it all back together repeatedly. It is something I have walked away from many times only to come running back and seek the type of solace that only writing can provide for me.

You reunited me back with my first love. Because every writer knows that nothing inspires good material like pain.

And nothing creates better poetry than heartbreak.

So truly, thank you, because without you, I would not have been able to write the love poem of all love poems and these days, I worry less that I will ever forget what we shared, because it exists forever within this poem.

However, what I am most excited for is the day I love or hate this poem more than I ever did you.

I cannot wait for the day that this poem finally becomes just another poem to me, and you become just another boy.

- m.m