you stood there with sadness
braided to your locks,
and i was pretty used to making homes out of sadness,
and your eyes — they made me think
of both writing poems and running away;
i chose the former
and you chose to smile;
and smiling back felt like jumping
inside a book found in the bottom
of shared beer bottles,
and yet, we read it sober
with our fingers touching
when we’d turn to the next page
and darling, that was how we met.

and there we were gazing at the stars
wrapped in a sunset;
and we named them love
written for a wolf
trapped in a girl’s skin
and a girl dressed
in bleeding moonlights
and together,
we crashed into a fray, unworthy
of being written poems about.
and i loved you so f*cking much,
and even more so because
you couldn’t love yourself
and darling, kissing wasn’t
the most romantic thing we ever did —
it was running away from the world
and darling, that was how
we fell in love.

and running away
was our kind of poetry,
and running away got tiresome
after four books and a couple of heartaches.
and we ended.
abruptly.
like an anticlimactic poem
written by fading silhouettes
atop an abandoned building
as the rest of the world
caught fire and crashed down.
and there you were,
a piece of a debris
escaping my lips and sinking down,
like words in the middle
of a poem i could no longer write,
and i, a pronoun
you could no longer love.
and that was how
we became ashes
without dancing with the flames —
how we became a million pieces
of broken kisses
inside a poem made for two.

and that was how
we became strangers again, darling —

and that was how
i
lost
you.