rhythmic reverie

thorns soften
stems break
flowers burn
a garden bed suffocates
your ashes i will no longer take

I’ve moved far enough from your space, leaving you with professed solitude you’ve missed, to only leave us displaced. I’ve become nothing but a myth; a once warm memory you now fabricate into a lie, one you tell yourself each night just to try to get by. But I know I remain the one true thing you once held in the palm of your hands, the light that’d turn everything dark around and within you bright again.

Small and poorly written, your name looks back at me from a bent envelope addressed to the past, an unsent letter I wrote in hopes of making something given up on, last. Inside I tell you a story of how we once planted our delicate roots together to grow, springing new life out of tiny seedlings we seamlessly sowed. We’d push through the dirt and bring fresh air into a world so bleak, until a garden bloomed out of two fragile beings, no longer weak.

But something cut the roots of your once unbreakable stems, leaving nothing of it but your choice to have me condemned. Soon my stem, too, was cut at the seams as I withered and wilted before your eyes. Left with unraveled roots and nothing to hold onto, you watched from afar the start to finish of my demise.

I can’t move far enough away from the memory that will forever hold you close, but I will plant different roots onto a new bed I’ve built, one that I alone will grow.