how could anyone love an eliza
when it stumbles off my tongue
like it doesn’t belong to me?

i’m easy to hold,
but impossible to reach

i can’t believe how easy you made it to forget me

shoveling the snow at 10 tonight,
because your parents aren’t home,
and i guess that’s what you do
when you’re 17.

you turn your back,
feel the sharp betrayal
of a snowball,
barreling from your sister’s hands.

grabbing the sleds,
saying just once.
is that what you do when you’re 17?
or am i still a child?

you walk the neighborhood.
the cold bites, exhilarating.
but the snow feels heavier somehow,
emphasizing the absence
of something you can’t name.

i remember the sweet honeysuckle days
when they would ask me
what i wanted to be when i grew up,
and i would say,
with the confidence only innocence provides,
“an author.”

i can’t say that i haven’t held on
to that youthful desire—
no, it lingers in the back of my mind,
a dream that glows dimmer with every year.

but as i’ve grown older,
as life has gotten less colorful
and my words feel like shadows
of what they used to be,
i’ve realized that some dreams
are better left as dreams.

perhaps it isn’t meant to be—
perhaps i was only ever meant to write
for myself,
to weave a world where no one else
has to live but me.

am i a poet?
because lately, i don’t think so.
no longer do i have the strength
to write more than a couple lines.
all i feel is despair,
and the desperate need to be alive again.
am i even a poet?
maybe i’m not.
maybe i’m just someone
who writes down their pain
and calls it art.

i could fill a library full of novels about you