She looked out her window and said “Speak from the heart.”
So I read her my lines. I told her my part.
I said “I’m not broken.” I said “I’m not lost.
I’ve not yet been trampled. But believe me, I’ve fought.”

And her eyes didn’t blink as she started to speak.
“I hear your voice quiver. Your smile is so weak.
You pull at your hair. You tug at your ears.
You sit on your hands and you laugh through the tears.”

“What do you feel when the silence gets loud?
What do you fear? What rains from your cloud?”
And I repeated those words. Without making a sound.
Caught up somewhere between stoic and proud.

How do you explain what it feels like to break?
When your body is hollow from a pain you can’t shake.
When you wake from your nightmare to find that it’s real.
How do you begin to explain how that feels?

And so she repeated, “Speak from the heart.”
And I nodded and chuckled. “So where do I start?”
I told her our story. It was love. It was right.
I told her our troubles. Every treacherous fight.

I told her you broke me. I thought I was gone.
And day-by-day passed and I could not move on.
And years have gone by and you follow me still.
Haunting my dreams and my thoughts and my will.

How do you go from love to regret?
I wanted you so; now I’d die to forget.
Your love was a curse. A sore. A disease.
I’m infected with you. How I long to be free.

And what she said next, caught me off guard.
“Do you not see just how lucky you are?
We all spend our lives in search of a spark.
A moment to light up a lifetime of dark.”

“Your love was a firework. Your love was a flare –
Bursting with fury and heat through the air.
And of course in a moment, all that remained
Was the echoes of passion and smoke, but no flame.”

“And now you feel hollow. And now you’re alone.
But the beauty is that you went to the show.
You saw your world light up. You felt your heart fly.
You heard the explosion as you lit up the sky.”

“Your love, it was beautiful. Your love, it was true.
And the pain that it caused even time can’t undo.
But don’t wish for a moment to leave it behind.
Because that love that has cursed you, I can’t wait to find.”

write amuck