We meet and my heart remembers,
though time has tried to forget.
Your voice, a melody aching,
a song that’s not over yet.

Each time we part, the wound reopens,
a pain both bitter and sweet.
But I'd choose the ache of you leaving,
over knowing we’ll never meet.

For how could I bear the silence,
the weight of a final goodbye?
I’d rather the fleeting embers
than an unlit, starless sky.

So come, even if it’s to vanish,
to break me and scatter my soul.
I’ll gather the pieces each time you leave,
for the hope of one day being whole.

Let me lose you a thousand times,
if it means I can hold you once more.
Your love is the hurt I choose to endure,
a wound I’ll forever adore.

Every fight.
Every night.
Every tear cried on my doorstep or yours.
Every other girl who caught your eye.
Every time you said you’d changed.
Then every time you became complacent again.
Your nose.
Your hair.
Your stare.
Your too-tight jeans.
Your perfect teeth.
And your laugh which could make or break me.
Your jealousy.
My jealousy.
My desperation.
My fear.
When you called me a woman.
And when you made me feel like one.
When you moved away.
When you came back for me.
Feeling safe for the first time.
Feeling safe for the last time.
Feeling love, for once reciprocated.
Feeling alone together.
Our first hello.
Our last goodbye.
And every ‘I love you’ in between.
These memories I keep.
I nurture them.
I examine them through new lenses,
And also through the same old ones as before.
To keep us alive.
To honour what once was.

You turned my nights into a tapestry of stars.
I’ve been searching the sky for that same constellation ever since.

I heard you’ve taken up honesty
like it’s a new hobby.
Quaint, like gardening or oil painting.
How bold, to dabble in virtue
only when the stakes are gone.

You’ll keep polishing that glass house,
convincing yourself it gleams with clarity,
never noticing the cracks spiderwebbing beneath.
One day, when it all comes crashing down,
you’ll call it a masterpiece
and swear the rubble was art.

It starts as a whisper, soft in my chest,
A thought unbidden, unkindly guest.
The urge to reach, to bridge the divide,
Where silence now stretches, too wide, too wide.

I pace the floor; I cradle my phone,
In this quiet war, I’m never alone.
Your name, like a needle, ****** at my brain,
Rewinding the reel of our joy and our pain.

Each old message, a relic, a hit,
I scroll through the past, scratching the itch.
The words are hollow, their warmth has fled,
But I cling to their ghosts like they're still being said.

My heart races faster, my reason grows dim,
This craving feels cruel, a fight I can’t win.
To press "send" would be bliss, a fleeting reprieve,
But I fight the withdrawal, cry tears on my sleeve.

So I silence the urge, let the moment decay,
And watch as the craving slowly fades away.
The answer’s not hidden in words I once knew,
But in learning to live without reaching for you.

You looked the same,
and yet nothing like I remembered.
Your eyes, sharp and soft all at once,
pulled me back to every place we had been,
and every place we never went.
The laughter we shared,
the fights that cracked us,
And the dreams we were too afraid to dream.