We tangled in tropes,
two archetypes in love with the idea of change,
but never the act itself.
You thought I was the manic pixie dream girl,
a glittering deus ex machina sent to save you
with whimsy and wild eyes,
but I was just tired—
carrying too many rewrites in my pockets,
each one heavier than the last,
all of them missing their endings.
I thought you were the brooding antihero,
mystery wrapped in shadow,
a walking epilogue with smoldering regret,
but you were just scared—
your silence a monologue
no audience could bear to sit through,
your pauses dragging like curtain calls
for plays that never finished.
We wrote each other into scenes
with props we didn’t know how to use,
a wine glass left unbroken,
a door no one ever slammed.
The spotlight flickered between us,
a dim bulb refusing to hold
all the things we wouldn’t say.
When the script fell apart,
we blamed the writer,
the lighting, the set—
anything but the truth:
we were always the ones
tearing pages from the book,
ripping them before the ink had time to dry,
our story left trailing ellipses,
a script still curled on the floor,
waiting for hands that never returned.
