The next time you tell a woman she’s beautiful,
you will mean it less —
because you have already meant it most.
She looks like a safe bet.
How boring for you.
She will never make your hands shake
when you try to button your shirt —
the buttons slipping like stones from your fingers,
like your body forgot how to be steady
because someone like me was looking at you.
It was never that serious.
Except, maybe, it was.
She will never make you reroute your whole life
just to cross her path.
She won’t know what it’s like
to catch you looking at her mouth
like it’s a dare you want to take —
but we know you’re all talk.
She wasn’t a hard person to love.
She was just a girl
who knew how to sit still.
And you —
you were just a man
who had only ever loved things
that were easy to set down.
You wanted something simple —
a woman like a neatly folded sweater:
wrinkle-resistant, polishes you up,
easy to pick up,
easier to put away.
But simple things never ruin your appetite.
They never make you whisper,
"God, what’s wrong with me?"
because you can’t stop thinking about
the car crash in your rib cage
that you wrote off as a particularly bad day.
But some bruises bloom twice,
and some wrecks keep ringing in your ears.
I was never easy to love —
but God, I was worth it.
And when I was yours,
you were someone better.
Isn’t that just vile?
It was never serious.
Except, apparently, it was.
Now I hope you choke on how simple it feels.
I hope you spend the rest of your life
wondering why you never had to catch your breath
when you kissed her.
I hope her laugh sounds too much like mine.
I hope you hear my name in her silence.
I hope she kisses you in a dark bar,
and for one awful second,
you forget whose lips are on yours.
I hope you miss me across midnights
and hate yourself for it.
I hope my scent won’t wash out of sheets I’ve never slept on —
like something you swore you imagined,
until you smell it again.
I hope you never stop searching out my poems,
then deleting your history.
I hope certain lines jangle like change in your pocket
over every street you’ll ever walk.
I hope the sharpest edges of my words
are so embedded in your psyche,
you can’t remember if it's a Vonnegut quote,
your own inner monologue, or me —
your real favorite writer.
I know I’ll never hear from you again —
but when you quote me in your head,
I hope you taste blood.
I hope you keep walking —
but never walk away clean.
It was never that serious.
Except, I guess, it was.
