On the Twentieth Evening When the Clock Forgot to Tick #BlogchatterA2Z #poetry

Of all the oxygen I’ve squandered in sighs, and all the oceans I’ve stored in my ribcage, if I am allowed one breath again — let it be the one where your name floated across the flickering hush of a birthday candle.

You were twenty, a calendar scar in silk — and I, unworthy narrator, somewhere close, somewhere cruel.

“I won't make it,” I texted, like a fool pressing razors into frosting. Your voice over the call carried a slump, a slow fall in frequency — a cello string wound too loose. I made a decision that smelled like redemption, and I arrived just as the fizz settled in cola glasses, and plastic menus fought for space with laughter.

There you were. Not waiting. Not expecting. But there, wearing a face like sunrise forgot it was late.

We sat — opposite poles of a magnet that had long since stopped pretending. Your friends were planets, orbiting our unsaid.

You gave me a slice of your pizza — anchovies exiled to the rim — and I bit in like Eucharist, like maybe, love came with tomato sauce and the soft part of crust.

The table swirled around us, but I heard nothing except your eyebrows dancing above your stories, and how my name sounded when chewed in your molars.

We paid in cash. No one split the check properly. Does the universe ever?

Down the stairs, to the world again, to terminals and late buses and unheld truths.

You walked ahead with your grippy group — the squad of laughter and college perfume — and I trailed like regret,

until you did that thing that still refuses to un-thing itself: You slowed. Let gravity break the rules. Let time pause for just one heartbeat less than a miracle.

You slid your fingers into the map of mine — so briefly — so bravely — and then took them back like a whisper you weren’t allowed to say out loud.

I heard every word in that silence. I just didn’t know how to speak back in your language.

So I lit a match made of mistakes. Fished out a cigarette like it held prophecy,

and you — hope-wrapped and hurting — said, “Not today.”

I — fool, flame, fortress of pride — said, “It has to be.”

And just like that, what was shimmering became shattered.

Two minutes between the cathedral of your touch and the cemetery of my smoke.

Two minutes between a future being born and a past being buried under ash.

Two minutes where the universe made me an offer — and I lit it on fire.

I want to go back, not to change history like a coward, but to kneel in that moment like a monk, and worship the decision I failed to make.

If you come back, if you ever do — just for that one evening, just for those slices and smiles —

I will halt the world at the staircase.

Right where your hand found sanctuary in mine.

I will take my other hand and fling the cigarettes into the oblivion they always deserved.

Because that, that was the real gift.

Not the cake or the confetti or the pizza.

But the unsaid permission to be someone better — if only I had listened.

The twentieth evening — the one with pizza crusts and miracles and near-misses — still lives in me like a ghost who’s afraid of the light.

And now, when I open my hand I sometimes feel a phantom warmth — where your fingers once trespassed, just long enough to say everything.

And I, every day since, have been learning to finally understand.

#Poetry #Regret #MissedChances #TwentiethBirthday #BittersweetMemories #HandsThatSpoke #NotToday #UnspokenLove #Past

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