You loved me as a woman but forgot I’m also a poem

When I don’t see you, I write about you. 

Because when I see you, I’m too busy falling apart beneath a smile. 

Every day I wake up having overpowered your control and every night I keep you in my prayers like a blessing you never were. 

Like the one person who gave meaning to the good in goodbye. 

There is one thing I won’t deny you. You loved me. 

You loved me as a woman but forgot I’m also a poem. 

A poem that screams to be read out loud and its words taken apart syllable by syllable. 

One that craves to be tasted verse by verse with its rhymes dripping from your lips. 

One that starts off dark but cracks open like the sun emerging from grey clouds. 

I tried to fill in the blanks for you but they were too many and time wasn’t enough to keep me going. There was no promise that you’ll ever understand. 

You were so used to loving surfaces, you forgot to look beneath for the depths I carry inside.

You were made to act and not speak, so you denied me of the thing I love most: words. 

Three words were never enough for someone who lives for books and prose. 

Three words were never enough for someone who lives for you.

Three words were never enough. 

It takes courage to love a poem. It takes the will to bare your soul. It takes vulnerability and risk. You, my one-letter weakness, had none. 

There is nothing and no one to be blamed. We replaced too many fullstops with comas and that’s where the blame lies. 

But now we know. We both know. That all I ever asked was to be read, but you were never a reader. 

We loved, and we loved then we lost. I don’t have pages for this poem so I can’t start a new one. If I turn it over, I start anew. 

I don’t feel for you like a writer for a good sentence.

I don’t feel for you like a painter for the perfect brush stroke.

I don’t feel for you like a morning for a warm cup of coffee.

I don’t feel for you.

I don’t.

You’re not my words anymore, you’re what lies between my lines. 

You’ve become a part of a silenced past. A nostalgic smile to a photo. An old playlist of favorites. 

I felt. 

Now, I don’t.

Now, I’ve numbed it.