The cruelest is yet to come—you’re incapable of love,
is that too bold of me to claim?
You know of love from the books you’ve devoured since you were eight,
the songs you only ever sing when there’s no one to bear witness,
the movies you insert yourself into every night.
You wet your feet in it, you’ve taken up a lover
(or what you think constitutes a lover).
You give them a pet-name, you kiss them in the sunlight,
you go through all the motions, and still,
your lukewarm heart buries itself six-feet underground.
As tender as they are—as sweet as they are,
the love they shower you with, the forehead kisses that find you when you’re drowsy,
the coffee that awaits you precisely at six-thirty a.m. every morning,
none of it, is enough for you.
You worry that you conflate your heart with apathy,
but the truth is more succinct than that:
you are a walking mausoleum
bereavement personified—you hold grief in your palms
like a leash to an almost-happy past.
You tug on it, and your sorrow pangs in response—
your past is still a book you can recite.
You don’t know how to love—
you left no room for it, your grief is all you know,
it’s all you ever amount to.
