The Chapter

A Poem by Labyrinthine

Prose

“

I will write you in a novel, black and white and full of words. But I have to ask you, if I made you the antagonist to my story, would you be offended? It’s true that I spent so much time of my life trying to trace the veins on your arms, twirling your short dark curls in my fingers, and memorizing how your tastebuds felt on my own tongue, but I spent longer trying to figure out why I let myself fall so in love with you when you were just trying to pass the time, never on the same level as I was. You were my hero, my soldier, my knight in shining armor. But then with the changing seasons, so did the story, and you became cold, biting as winter’s wind, becoming the villain, the dark, brooding character, eating souls and happiness away to benefit your own mood disposition. You held in your hands, in your pockets, in your bags nothing but a ghost, a ghoul, the bad luck to your own good character.

Oh, why didn’t you just tell me I was wasting my time, loving you with every last bit of me that I could give? I loved you too hard, forgive me for that. You saw it coming, why did you let me fall? Do you like the black and blue and yellow and red of my bruised knees and my bloody palms? They healed like every cell does, but there is always an invisible ache. I spent countless summer nights and lazy days trying to forget your name and shake off the prints you left on my skin. Could you believe I was so lucky to have had all these soaking nights in the rain to take advantage of so that I may disguise my crying so that no one would ask why? I ached for days, my bones became brittle and the skin on my wrists were so weak, the veins in my neck would clot with misery undefined, and it was all because of the way your voice sounded, the way your name slipped from my lips with bitterness and with nostalgia, the way my mind and my heart would soak with heaviness at the notion of your existence. Oh, I’m so sorry, I loved you too hard, forgive me for that.

And now, just like most nights, I sit here writing prose, my mind filled with memories I can’t erase, my innocence wasted and can’t be replaced, moments in time that have slipped away and out of my fingers, lost like sand on a beach. I have no choice but to miss you, to miss the protagonist that hardly existed, that, if ever embedded into the pages of a novel, would make femme readers melt away, wishing they’d have a hero like you. You could have been Mr. Darcy, a beloved Romeo, the boys that women swooned over. Instead you became the dark shadow that looms in the crevices of the book and destroys everything that is good.

Forgive me for that, but you are nothing but the antagonist to my story. And that is what makes you the one man in my life that I won’t ever forget or let go of, and will live in me forever to tell the story of why I have to love so intensely and hesitantly. Forgive me if I am wrong, but with all of the nights I spent wishing on shooting stars I saw with you, tracing the creases on the bedsheets where we spent nights discovering each other, and stealing kisses before they were gone, I wish on every little thing that they become the distant past, only stories to tell my children that aren’t yours.

You are a story, a poem, a song, a novel, that, and just that, for the rest of my days.