Everyone says I should forget you

I love on.

Everyone says I should forget you.

It’s over. Time to move on. I gather up whatever remnants of you lay about my space. I write you a letter goodbye. I get my most stoic girlfriend to agree to meet you in a parking garage. To hand  you the plastic bag. I watch from the car -- I want to be there and see your face when you take it from her. 

I see it too-- especially when Angie goes near you. How far apart you two are. Your creasing body, your bending ways. She and I are two young and supple trees barely able to touch the sun. Your bark is coming loose.

So it’s done and now all that’s left is the talking -- the unwinding of you. I go to Lidia and sit in a chair and I wail and I wait and I tie up and untangle the reasoning. I hear out the mess that you must be and I wonder why I let you happen. 

It slows over weeks, over time -- I subtract you from the idea of today and another and then some. I find someone else to bother with and start up that mistake instead and write again and again your name in different letters on the edges of my days.

I move on. I move on. I love on. I find a cooler place, a different me. I reshape myself around someone new and I feel myself outgrowing the shoes of you. I feel myself moving into a new heart and hear myself writing new songs.

I love on, though. I’m in Ireland and I love on. There’s no helping the Florence sunset and you in it. I love on, and find myself in a little dark cave bar in London and there you are again. I have company. I am never alone. But I remember what I wrote to you in the letter I left in the plastic bag that Angie gave you.

I am leaving you -- you can’t have this anymore. 

But I’ll love on.