2018 - I see you smiling at me while we’re watching a play. I get this feeling I’ll never know your name.
1918 - Returning home from war to find you with another man. A story in a story, a sadness in the sad...
1818 - Now I’m a Frankenstein tormented by a monster.
1718 - I arrive in a New Orleans where soon I forgot her.
1618 - The execution of one of the greatest explorers makes my heart afraid to find a new lover.
1518 - I’m in Italy now admiring a Michelangelo, passions are burning and you’re my new antidote.
1418 - In Florence there’s talks of a new cathedral, competition in design yet to you there’s no equal.
1318 - From the English the Scottish fight for independence but I would sell my soul just to be in her presence.
1218 - From Acre I leave for Egypt, a crusade of the soul, but I gave that to you not too long ago.
1118 - A new pope on the throne holding a king like he’s owned but you’re a free spirit and your name... I won’t know...

Memories traveller.
I remember when I was younger and my mother would sneak into my room with a handful of secrets, revealing them to be flowers. Lavender. She said it was to help the sleepless, and that I was. Restless from the monsters under my bed she’d sing me songs, the scent and tingles she’d sent streaming up my spine were seamless, one melting into the other. She’d tuck me in cozily and I’d noticed the smell of a light purple colour that she’d crushed into my palm, a mortar, her soft fingers the pestle. So when the years went by and our time grew shorter, with the linear layout of these memories would I wrestle as I’d strain to remember what our time together was like before you passed finally one last, lost, dreary November. Then one day, as the rain fell outside our house the bushes it struck were made of lavender and I felt like I had been saved, because once again I’d found you.

Again.
You leave.
Leaving me lifeless.
Life’s lessons are learned
Like this.
Through crisis.
Through hurt,
Through grief.
Heartbreaks make a survivalist.
Burnt out from the time I was
Seventeen;
Burst,
My heart has been set out for all to see;
Plainly strung up in pieces,
Like leaves
Hanging
Precariously on a tree,
Made from the bones and ashes of lovers
I’d never meet,
Each new year bringing a wind that rips
them from their branches,
A wind that dances through my memory.
This year it was you.
Turning me golden like maple leaves in
autumn my mind’s marked me as a dying
season.
And you,
You treated me like a poison.
Times testaments teach
To forgive
...Within reason.
You were a part of me
And I committed treason.

I’m always too late.
As I open a new door and hope beyond hope that you will be there with an outstretched hand to grasp, to lead me to love and a lifetime of calm and content, I find it there, still held out yet recently gripped. Slipped out of my reach and into the path of another, luckier, funnier, happier, leaving me the lonelier, once more, contemplating how I missed my chance and if I’d have arrived sooner, unrealistically, and stolen you away in a merry chase, fate would have been kinder. But none but me could have been blinder, still lingering on what could have been and leaning hopefully to a truth that will never be. Us. Thus time is finicky, a whirlpool of whispering questions teaching valuable lessons that no one hears until you arrive at the moment you’re in now and already it’s gone and you forget how you got there and what went wrong. But while I’m gone, wondering the reasonings and all it brings, not everything stayed the same. I weighed my wait. I’m always too late.