Do your hands still look the same as they did?
Do you still wear those shirts?
Are your shoes still under your desk?
Do you still worry about your hair turning grey?
Does your voice still sound like song?
Do you still lie awake at night
Thinking about it over and over
Wondering if you could redo it,
Over and over, would you?
Do you still wish you were somewhere else?
Or do you find moments of happiness in your kids that make it all seem less suffocatingly unhappy?
Do you think about me?
Do you wonder where I am,
Who I am with?
Or if I am content with me, myself and I,
Like I always have been?
Do you hope I burnt those letters?
Do you go over those last words you never said to me,
Until your brain burns
And you wish you could break your head in half like the shed your father built and you destroyed?
Do you wish you had told me you loved me
Or is it for the best?
Are you lonely without me?
Is there a hole where I used to live,
A hole that gets bigger each year,
An ache that never dissipates?
Or are you relieved I am no longer part of your thoughts?
Are the ‘what if’s’ dulled with my distance?
Are you happier now that life is no longer in colour,
And you can just sink back down to where I found you?
Is pretending to not know any different helping?
Do you sleep peacefully no longer having to wrestle with your conscience?
Do you lie awake at night like you have always done?
Your eyes closed,
Trying to remember how my skin felt on yours?
How nothing of ourselves was off limits?
How electricity seeped through our fingertips
And into our souls?
How we wanted break each other open just so we could get a little closer.
Do your distractions make up for my desire?
Has doing the right thing and staying,
Made up for the not leaving, and losing yourself a little each day?
Has losing me meant you gained her and everything you ever wanted?
Or are you still untouched and unloved in union?
Is she still blind to everything you are?
To what you let go you will never find again
And to that which we both lost, will be lost forever
Photo by Anastasia Nelen on Unsplash
Emily Algar
Emily Frances Algar is a journalist and writer. She has experience in the music industry working as the A&R on the Grammy Nominated Album (Best Folk Album) Front Porch by artist Joy Williams. Emily has been published in a number of print and digital publications including Atwood Magazine, American Songwriter, and Record Collector magazine. She specializes in both long and short-form features as well as interviews and reviews. She has written pieces ranging from the commercialization of feminism and feminism in popular culture, critiques surrounding freedom of speech and the #MeToo movement as well as recently interviewing refugees from Iran. Emily has a Masters in International Security from Oxford Brookes University. Her thesis looked at the extent to which the media shaped public opinion during the Vietnam and Iraq (2003) wars.
