The Past Tense of You

I know I have to let you go.
I've known it for a while now,
the way you know winter is coming
even while the leaves are still pretending.

These dreams I cradle in hushed hours,
these fragile worlds I spin from nothing,
threaded from air,
from memory,
from longing,
they live only inside me.
I know that.

And still, they are beautiful.
Because you are there.
Because in them,
the world is gentle
and we are not lost.
We say the right things.
We choose each other.
Life opens its hands instead of closing them.

And living there,
in those soft, impossible places,
feels kinder
than anything reality has ever offered me.

I know
we will not meet again
the way I rewrite us.
I know I will never hold you
the way my arms still remember.

And one day,
your name will reach me in the past tense,
you loved,
you chose,
you married
someone who was not me.

This small escape I built,
this hiding place made of maybe,
cannot last forever.
Sooner or later,
I will have to stop visiting
the life that almost happend.
I will have to stand still long enough
to admit what it is:
finished.
gone.
real.

And still,
I am greedy.

Greedy for the life we never lived.
For the mornings we never woke into,
for the small, ordinary forever
that slipped through our fingers
before it ever began.

So I linger here,
postponing the leaving,
folding time into smaller pieces
so I don't have to walk too far ahead.

But I know
one morning,
I will rise
and step forward into a future
where you exist only as an echo.

And it hurts,
even imagining that horizon.

But I believe this now,
that people do not wander into us by accident.
Some arrive like storms,
some like shelter.
Some stay.
Some leave us holding questions.
And some,
like you,
leave us holding lessons.

So when I finally reach that distant shore,
when your name no longer trembles
in the center of my chest,
I think I will understand:
you were not meant to stay.
You were meant to open something in me.
To show me how deeply I could feel.
To show me how deeply I could lose.

And in the silence that follows,
when pain has softened into wisdom,
I will know what you gave me,
not forever,
not a future,
not a life together,
but the slow, trembling courage
to loosen my grip,
to unclench my hands,
to bless what could not stay,
and learn, at last,
the gentle, devastating grace
of letting go.

KR