The Coward's Curse

While I've traded in the right to indulge in the idea of you, it’s difficult not to.

Most days are fine, some less painful, and others - deeply tortured.

Those days are agony, filled with the maybes and make-believe memories of who you might've turned out to be.

What fairy tales would’ve kept you up at night?

And which lullabies would've brought you to paradise?

What age would you have traded paper planes and blanket forts for scrolling screens and teenage dreams?

Where goodbye kisses were no longer cool, and you'd beg me to drop you off a couple blocks away from school.

Where would you have stood in all of life’s great debates?

What topics would've been worth the sleepless nights? And what would've peaked your mind and set your soul alight?

At what moment would you have staunchly defined our differences?

Where my ways would turn into "the old days" and it'd be your time to shine

Who would've been the first to put stars in your eyes? Make you write love letters under the sheets and sneak out with fake IDs?

Would you have trusted me with all of your secrets?

Call me when your heart would've been bruised and beaten?

Would you have come to me when you felt like the world was closing in on you for the first time?

Would I have built a safe enough space between us, where you felt like things would turn out "just fine"?

And in the end, would we have been great friends - you and I?

The wretched wondering that has haunted me from the first time I saw those two lines:

Could I have been all you needed me to be?

Perhaps, maybe.

These words are my misery, my black hole of stifled possibilities.

This is the shame I carry for being terrified of birthing you into life of instability.

To my little one that never was, please...forgive me.

Maze of Regrets

I can't remember the last time you and I were alone in your space, it's been years. So much life has happened between now and then, though I've only just dipped my toes. Wonder what you would have thought of it all, the choices I've made, the roads I decided not to take, with so many bridges left to cross.

My mind has been running circles around what I might find upon my return to your resting place. I had readied myself for this moment, hungry for it. I imagined running my fingers over marble and feeling you exhale through the stone. Would I be cradled by a warmth resonating from your grave, by a presence far greater than the one constantly on my shoulders?

A treacherous gamble of hope, this is. I could spend a lifetime looking for you in the cobwebs of my mind, where myths are molded from yesterday's ashes. I'll only take myself in circles, inside this beautiful maze of broken mirrors. Grant me the twisted comfort in playing a game of Hide and Seek in this little labyrinth of ours. Bring me back to that wide-eyed fourteen year old, following the music that your voice makes, grasping for your hand that's seemingly just a touch out of reach.

Sometimes, it is much easier to be her, to be that little girl who'll never stop searching. Maybe, just maybe, if I tread carefully enough through the Haunted Woods, follow the rhymes and rhythms of the Cheshire Cat, I'll find you. Perhaps you're being held captive by the evil Queen of Hearts. If I paint all the white ones you happened to miss, do you think she'd let you go? Or maybe you're slaying pirates at Skull Rock. If I bribe the Mermaids atop Marooner's, seduce them with a prisoned Pan, will they lead me safely to your hiding place? Or maybe you're not far, just past this Forbidden Forest, at the end of the Yellow Brick Road.

I wonder.

It is a gentler kind of pain; To be prisoner in my own mind than to be greeted by a damp forsaking. Nothing, just the muggy truth that kissed my cheeks when I finally opened the doors to your palace. Old friends started to fall from these eyes. They came with a cold reality, the one that insists I probably wouldn't be who I am if our tender cards didn't fold the way they did. How I wish I could undo this wicked trade, strike a deal with the dark and take you back, take you home.