I always imagined you’d be the forever kind of girl. The girl to sit and shake her head at me when I threw stale cake out the window for the birds. The girl who’d lie down on the floor with me and tell me it wasn’t the end of the world. The girl who’d come in every evening and ask me whether I thought it was going to rain tomorrow.
I thought we were forever kind of people.
My mind turned too quickly to fairy tales and to the stories of first love that I always pretend I don’t believe in. We strolled arm in arm down a beach, off into the sunset, but it was a sunset scheduled between work, scripts, characters and miles and months apart. It was only the warm, sticky arms, the smooth fingers and the morning hair that turned it into a forever kind of feeling.
There were always clocks between us. You prized your watch above anything else and you let its hands turn and turn, conscious of every tick, every tock that came between us. You were waiting for the ending but I didn’t want to stop living in the story.
I thought our impermanence was permanent. We were living in forever in fleeting moments, in an hourglass continually turned round and round. I was writing us a forever kind of story that didn’t end with happily ever after because there was no final page.
You kept looking everywhere for that final page.
I kept it blank in my pocket. I couldn’t build you a house to hang your clock on the wall in, I couldn’t build you a fence or plant you a garden or bake you a cake to throw to the birds when we’d had enough of it. The only ending is the end of the world and I don’t think that was the ending you wanted me to write.
Maybe, maybe you were a forever kind of person but I just wasn’t a forever kind of girl.
(A prose poem. The speaker is my character Amelie, who I've written a couple of poems for before)