To The One Who Was Never Mine

Hello Lover,
Soft glances over broken bottles
you’re getting ready to leave
with the morning air
and I can’t stop you
and I can’t watch you.
and I can’t hold you
back.
because you can’t hold back
what isn’t yours.
and you certainly were never mine.
sometimes I wonder
if I myself,
was ever mine.

But lover,
that misty morning
in December last year,
or decade,
when our lips brushed
and our bones gasped in wonder,
under the warmth of two hearts of stone,
that moment,
when the universe collapsed
and reformed
in the blink of your eyelids,
that moment,
is mine.
Like the countless others,
when the globe stopped revolving,
to admire
two cold beings
on fire.

All those moments,
that history books have forgotten about
all of them,
are mine.

My mother had taught me
in 2nd grade
that you can’t hold on
to anything at all.
Because holding on is sad
it takes away
the ability to live,
and dream
and allow happiness
to enter.

Maybe that is why,
I’ve learnt to let go
more than to hold tight,
and sometimes,
when the wind asks me,
about the lovers I lost
and the loves I didn’t hold close,
I laugh, but do not respond.
I can’t tell the wind
or the howling voices
of the universe,
that I’ve made museums
of human beings
inside me,
colonies of the ways,
they’ve formed me
live in between my skin cells
and every time
a new person decides to leave
I make a home for them
in the vacant galaxies
of my lungs
So that every breath I ever take
from here on,
smells a lot like,
them,
the loves that could’ve been
but never were.