Warning Signs

Jagged memories rip me away from him

He is so kind

So loving

And he’s mine

But somehow, when he speaks, it feels familiar

“I’ll call you in a while,” he says. “I’ll talk to you when I’m off work.”

Like the guy before him

And so,

like the guy before him,

I never truly expect to hear my phone ring

“I love spending time with you,” he says.

“But it’s time to go now. I’ll see you again soon.”

Like the few before him, I believe it in the moment,

But the next day I start to doubt.

After a week, will it be over?

Or was that just the others?

“I didn’t think I’d feel this way about you when we met,” he says.

The others might have well have said the same thing.

“I didn’t think I’d fall this fast,” one said

“I can’t imagine my life without you,” said another

“Lily, I want years of you,” was in there too

Although none hurt as bad as “I think I want this to last forever.”

Especially when it didn’t

The others followed a pattern:

We meet, and we fall hard.

We are fire and ice

and destruction and breath

all at once

And for a moment, we own the world

We are royalty. We are an empire.

We are unstoppable.

Or at least that’s what they tell me.

And then they stop coming by,

They stop calling,

They fade away into the background,

Or they give their attention to someone else.

There’s always signs but rarely a clean break,

so I trained myself to recognize the omens.

We’ll see each other less

And you’ll disappear longer

And leave me on read more

And call me “babe” less and less.

And so when I see him busy

When he disappears for a few hours

When he leaves me on read,

it takes everything in me not to pull away

We didn’t fall right away, but we’re still falling hard.

We weren’t fire and ice,

but rain and echos.

We weren’t destruction,

But by God we were breath.

We weren’t great in a moment,

but our moments make us great

And no one has ever made me feel so safe

So when you’re so much different than all the others,

Why do your actions still feel like warning signs?