For You, But Not To You
For You, But Not To You
love, poetry, unsent letters....
I wrote you a hundred times
in the backseat of autos,
in café napkins and voice memos
I never had the courage to replay.
You live in drafts
of messages I type at 2:14 a.m.
and delete by 2:16
because even silence feels safer
than your indifference.
You smiled at me once ....
just a small curve,
barely enough to anchor a dream to.
But I built a city from it anyway.
A city where we had the same taste in music,
the same grocery list,
the same key to the front door.
I noticed the way you always look away
before someone finishes their sentence.
I wanted to be the first person
you listened to all the way through.
You loved people
who weren’t me.
And I loved the version of you
I built in my poems,
softened at the edges,
outlined in candlelight,
always reaching for me in the end.
But in real life
you just passed me in corridors,
spoke to me like I was rain
you didn’t want but were too polite to curse.
It wasn’t cruelty.
It was carelessness.
Which, somehow, hurts more.
I told myself
maybe you weren’t ready.
Maybe you didn’t see me.
Maybe the universe was saving us
for later.
But the truth is
you were never mine to wait for.
You were a season
that never stopped to snow on me.
Still, I leave space for you
in every poem I write.
Just a little room in the last stanza,
as if maybe this time,
you’ll knock.
I never told you any of this.
So here, take it in rhyme.
A love letter I’ll never send,
addressed to a name
that stopped reading me
long ago.
