You extinguished the flame,
Yet the embers still glow,
In the quiet corners of my heart,
Where memories flow.
A tale of love and loss,
Shared from long distance,
In the red-lit dark,
A connection, a longing,
A love that begged for amnesia,
As tears stained Paris.
“Was it your husband?” you asked.
“No,” she replied,
“I met him years before,
When I was young and unformed,
Dynamic and beautiful,
With no real sense of my value.”
He saw it, delivered the experience,
I was unwilling to accept,
So I ran, he let me,
With beauty, passion,
And always a scan,
Looking deep into my soul,
Seeing me without words.
The combination of power,
Humility, generosity, passion,
Was too much to take as real,
So I ran, spent 20 years,
Washing him from the fabric of my soul.
I married the man,
Who reminded me in subtle ways,
Of who he was,
He became the bar,
By which all men were measured,
The haunting traits I looked for everywhere.
A strange thing occurred,
As he emerged from uncharted territory,
He identified as love,
Swept away for 16 years,
Bringing the total number of years to 33.
The phone call,
From what seemed like another dimension,
A voice so familiar, long awaited,
I nearly hit the floor,
I spent time examining,
Why now, after 16 years of intentional silence,
Shipwrecked in uncharted territory,
He named love.
We spoke,
I noticed so many versions of me,
Represented on that call,
None of them angry, all of them curious,
Multiple lifetimes flashed through my mind,
What we could’ve been,
Had he not gotten shipwrecked,
In uncharted territory.
But his love, capsized by a new bar set by you,
Extinguished this flame from the past,
I compared him to you,
A man he could never be,
I wished it was you on that call,
Instead of him,
When I tried to imagine a future with him,
I only saw us in the end,
Until sunbeams find you.