I kept a picture of you
above my bed for a long time.
I don't know why I left it there
for so long after you had left-
maybe it was out of hope that you would come back,
or out of the blind faith that you had never really left.
But it stayed and gathered dust and waited.
Waited for a day it thought would come,
the day when you reentered and found joy in its presence.
This picture saw me water
my bedspread every night for months,
hoping that would bring back old flowers that had died in the winter's cold.
This picture saw me hold a fragile piece of
lined paper in my hands
as if the words would revive some dead corpse buried deep
in the hard dirt.
This picture saw me look out my window and
gaze across the dead sea,
wishing to see floating pieces that could be put back together.
But when flowers die there's no coming back.
And corpses always stay cold.
And the dead sea has that name for a reason,
its pieces shrivel up.
So this picture,
it saw it all-
the cold months, the dreadful months, the months of repair and repentance, the months of sunshine and hope-
and for a while it held onto pathetic moments that seemed optimistic.
But pictures are amoral and hold no bias.
It was not fooled by faux-kindness and false hope,
unlike I,
and begged to be taken down.
Every time I walked into my dungeon it moped and wailed, but I was deaf.
Until one day, you ripped off my ears and forced me to hear.
So I took out the picture
and dropped it in the fire,
the death it had been begging for.