than we were before we even met.

the thing is that i still love you, but i’m not in love with you anymore. and that feels weird to say. it feels bitter on my tongue, but it’s true. when i kissed you last, it felt like you were home, but now i’m not sure we’d even fit into each other’s sides the way we used to. your voice pops up in old videos and it still washes over me the way it always did, but it doesn’t leave me feeling clean. i don’t know what exactly it means to love you—because of course i do, you were so important to me—but to no longer want to be with you. i don’t know how to navigate this new territory of you still mean the world to me but you’re not my entire galaxy. in all honesty, i think i always knew we’d grow in different directions. i don’t think you understand how much that would’ve hurt, to watch that happen. but i could already feel the growing pains, and they hurt enough for me to know i didn’t want to wait around to feel the agony of the distance. so i love you, i do, you were my best friend, but you aren’t my reason for breathing. i mean, to be fair, you never were. i don’t love anybody like that anymore, but my day is okay, good even, without you being part of it. i mean, i hope you can forgive me for this, because i don’t think you have. i mean, i hope that maybe one day you’ll understand me, because i don’t know if you did, in the end. i mean, i hope you’re happy, or at least at some point you get there.

i was scared i’d never write again after my last book. it took everything, and i mean everything, out of me. and that’s because so much of my writing was steeped in the pain i’d experienced, and i finally put it down. i finally walked away from it without any desire to come back, and i felt … empty. empty of words. for the first time in years, i had no poems left in me to write.

so i sat and waited for them to come. i searched that dark place inside me and found nothing waiting for me there anymore. and fuck, that was terrifying, to reach into the part of me that had fed me so many poems for the last six years, and come back empty-handed. there was a part of me that, against my better judgment, thought, was the healing worth it? was finally being able to move past what happened worth this?

and of course it was. i wouldn’t have ripped that wound open again, not for anything in the world. but it was hard to look elsewhere for inspiration because for the longest time, i’d never had to. why would i? that gaping hole inside me was pouring out words. i never even wrote them all down. some slipped through the cracks between my fingers as i tried to catch them and press them to the page. there was a voice in me that wanted to hunt for those lost words. to find them and make something pretty out of them.