Yesterdays You: An Atlas of Almost-Loves and Forgotten Moments #BlogchatterA2Z #poetry

(fragments recovered from the wreckage of unrealized mornings)

You slipped through my fingers like a radio signal at the end of the world,
a ghost calling from the static of every hour I didn’t spend with you.
I buried the blueprint of your laughter in a time capsule marked "never open,"
the ground beneath it, rich with years that have never known how to forget.

Once, I mailed you a letter made of unsaid prayers,
addressed to the wrong zip code of my heart—
the address said: "If Found, Destroy."
The train left before you arrived, and I stayed to apologize to the empty tracks,
staring at the stars that never crossed the night for me.

In another version of winter, you never wore my silence like a noose,
never held it like a weapon aimed at all the words I didn’t dare to speak.
Your name is still smudged into the condensation of my forgetting,
bleeding through time like a forgotten password to the parts of me that still care.

I dreamt you were a staircase. I climbed you barefoot and bled poetry,
each step like a promise I made and never kept.
I loved you like a city that forgot its own language,
lost in translation, a map without a legend or a name.
You spoke forgiveness in a dialect my guilt had long abandoned,
as if it had only ever been a second language to begin with.

Somewhere, a moth dreams it is you. Somewhere, a flame dreams it is me.
We were always moving in opposite directions,
you the moon pulling at my tide,
and I, the earth, turning away with each rotation.
I sold my future to the first vendor who offered me a second of your attention,
even though I knew your silence would always outbid my desperation.

You painted your goodbyes in disappearing ink across my clavicle,
and I wore them like tattoos made of your absence.
The museum of lost chances closed early today,
and I didn’t get to say goodbye to your exhibits,
to the empty rooms where we used to be something.
My tongue still folds into origami apologies when I try to speak your name,
as if even the syllables themselves couldn’t survive the weight of what we never were.

The sky blinked, once, in your handwriting,
and I wondered how it could remember you so well,
when my mind had forgotten the shape of your eyes.
I wore your almost-love like a parachute made of mist,
its threads too thin to catch me if I fell.
You mistook my fear for disinterest,
and I mistook your sadness for a language I wasn’t meant to speak.

Once, we shared a heartbeat across the fault lines,
and the ground beneath us cracked open into two different afternoons.
I wanted to ask you if you felt it too,
but the question never made it past the rubble of everything I left unsaid.
If you find the version of me that stayed, tell her I miss her, too—
tell her I never meant to run.

You left your absence pressed like a flower between the pages of my mistakes,
a pressed memory I still carry like the ghost of something precious
that never had a chance to bloom.
Somewhere, a black box recorder replays every almost we ever nearly became,
every sentence that ended in a comma instead of a period,
every moment that slipped through our hands like sand.
The sentence was supposed to end in love,
but it never made it past the ellipsis of regrets.

I sent you Morse code dreams: .-.. --- ...- . / -- . / ..-. --- .-. . ...- . .-.,
and you misheard them as static.
I wasn’t speaking your language,
and you weren’t listening for mine.
The earth tilts a little whenever I almost remember you,
a small tremor beneath my feet,
like the aftershock of something that was never meant to last.

I loved you from the wrong side of the glass.
You never saw the fingerprints,
the smudges I left behind trying to reach you.
The guilt grew vines around my ribs,
and they bloom only when you laugh—
because your laugh was always the garden I never knew how to tend.

Today, I wore your memory like armor.
Tomorrow, I’ll wear it like a scar,
still tender, still fresh with the pain of knowing what we could never be.
Your shadow still tries to dance with mine when no one is watching,
and I can feel it, just out of reach,
but never really gone.

If you ever feel the sudden shiver of being almost loved,
it’s just me,
folding again into you,
like an envelope full of unsent letters,
like a song left unfinished,
like the last note in a chord that never resolves.
Yesterdays You: An Atlas of Almost-Loves and Forgotten Moments #BlogchatterA2Z #poetry

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Comments

One response to “Yesterdays You: An Atlas of Almost-Loves and Forgotten Moments #BlogchatterA2Z #poetry”

  1. MyWordBubble Avatar

    Such intelligent and beautiful writing! Loved the analogies and thought process!

    Liked by 1 person

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