I changed in the night
after two years of happiness
or something like it
one year of purgatory
I wanted you when you didn't want me.
Now it feels like the end of a dream,
the breaking of a spell,
the beginning of a reality.
Visited in the night by a thing, a thought,
a girl who wanted to travel, you could picture her looking ethereal,
worldly,
writing books in strange places, happy
married--but not to you
living--but not this life.
Not in a town where dreams go to die.
But as I made myself closer, I was trapped instead, bound eternally.
I'm in love--but not with you.
Visited in the night by a man
that I wanted who didn't exist.
Because I should have ceased years ago.
People look younger when they died in a past life.
Do I think about it?
Every day--visited by a secret, a sad truth
I can't.
But visions can carry you away.
"Two years of happiness" would actually put me at twenty--this may have been written in the small TV room upstairs while I lived with my friend. I feel like I used the term incubus (a *** demon) because I had imagined a future where I traveled and wrote and felt guilty for thinking about it while I moved down a different path with my fiance. I also felt guilty for wanting both--dreaming about the future or feeling optimistic about my current path--because I was never supposed to live to be this old and have to make these decisions. Years ago, I had bought an old dictionary of superstitions from a thrift store and read that people who look young had died young in a previous life.
(Coming of Age - K. D. Kilker) Years of handwritten poetry and stories will be typed for safekeeping online following a technological failure in 2013. I am currently twenty-one and the pieces range from the age of fourteen to nineteen. They may not be good, but they are revealing.