To The Man Who Will Never Be Mine

I know.

I know that the numbered hours we spent are only just that, hours. Hours that you spend like all the hours and minutes and seconds of your every passing day, but to me these are hours, minutes, and seconds I spent with you. There is a difference.

In my hours you were in it. While you go restlessly, walking in your path, diving into the sea, climbing the hills, gazing at the stars, I see you. I see you kick the pebbles out of the way so I can walk behind you with ease. I see you diving after me whenever the current is strong to keep me from drifting away to sea. I see your muscles tense as you struggle to hold my hand so I wouldn’t fall off the cliff. I see you trace your finger to the sky connecting the stars, showing me your constellation. I see you, but when you look at me, I am not the one reflected in your eyes.

I know that it was a one-way ticket, and yet still I rode the train even though I knew had no chance of returning. No chance of returning from these feelings I have for you. A feeling I know is bound for oblivion, forever drifting into an infinite space, never bouncing back because while you are a black hole, I am a star certain to be swallowed whole.

And I know you are the man who will never be. The man who will never be mine.

I know that you will never be mine. But you see, I can’t dictate whose name my heart shouts over and over and over until dawn breaks in the morn. I lose sleep because I can’t close my eyes knowing I’ll see you behind these heavy, tear-filled lids and it’ll hurt so much more by accepting that no matter how loud my heart shouts for your name, the words will never reach you.

I can’t dictate whose face my mind replays over and over and over until I see you in every place, every story, every quote, every sad song that I come across because you have whirled into my life like a storm, raging in all your glory only to leave destruction in your wake.

I cannot dictate whose being my soul gravitates to because it has found a light no one else had shown it. It has found you, your depth, your wit, your gentle strength, your entirety, an entirety that will never fill the empty space beside me on the park bench. A gentle strength that will never again grab hold of my hand as I reach the peak of our mountain. A wit that I can never spar with over coffee or tea or a Coke. And a depth I will never have the chance to lose into.

I know.

God, I know.

I know, I will never have you.

And you won’t have me, but the stark difference between you and me is that I wanted you.

I want you. I will still want you, but all I am to you is a passing moment, a fleeting second, a mere touch of fate like that of an intersecting line, meeting at one point only to drift apart in an infinite time.

You won’t have me, but you aren’t the one picking up pieces of yourself, trying to understand why you are broken in the first place when you had only loved. You won’t have me, but you aren’t the one spending the nights listening to a song that weaves the story of man unable to return the love of a woman. You won’t have me, but I am the one who’s empty and who lost.

I know.

I know that you and I are just two souls in this lifetime chanced to meet, but never meant to stay.

And I know that I will have to take my first step forward, that I will have to take only the pieces that I have of me and leave those of you and see for myself as my own entirety, an entirety worth the same love and passion and empty spaces on park benches. I will use my own strength to walk in the path that you had once taken, paving my own to reach that mountain peak and once I do, I’ll trace the stars to form my own constellation because I can. And I will.

So, here ends our time, here is the meeting point of our intersecting line and I write this, love, hoping my words will finally reach you. Wherever you are in this world, whatever you are doing at this hour, if ever you are going to read this in your lifetime, know that I was once a woman who had loved a man who will never be hers.