If I didn’t think it’d make me appear crazy still,
I’d apologize to you for having been so crazy then.
Reading the poems I had written about “us”
resurrected all that nervous heat, reminded me
of the insistent stutter of my longing,
how I could never just lay it out there for you.
The answer, clearly, would have been
no, thank you. But perhaps that tough line
would have been enough to salvage all
that was good and woolly about us: your laugh,
that golden ring I’d always stretch a story for;
the pair of mittens we’d split in the cold
so we’d each have a hand to gesture with;
how even now, the paths we took are filled
with starry wonder and all that bright limitless air.
I’m sorry I could never see myself
out of the twitching fever of my heartache,
that I traded everything we had for something
that never ended up being. But if I could take
any of it back, it wouldn’t be the glittering hope
I stuck in the amber of your eyes, nor would
it be the sweet eager of our conversations.
No, it would be that last stony path to nothing,
when we both gave up without telling the other.
How silence arrived like a returned valentine
that morning we finally taught our phones not to ring.
- Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz, “After Reading Old Unrequited Love Poems” (via fleurishes)