Fall Apart and Blame It on Our Hearts
Free verse poetry
our forecast lingers in the air with a dying fragrance thickening, stifling, turning into clouds, we condensate fall apart and blame it on our hearts when we transition, can you? breathe through all these changes can you even see? my hand in yours we embrace to brace for fresh fallen storms, we cascade around ourselves, pouring all over common ground braving the impact, loud in the silence of drowning turning blue in what we’ve become we did all we could do now we do what we can stare, unfazed amazed as we go down in a blaze
Background context
The point of this poem was to capture the chaotic beauty of endings. More specifically, the endings you see coming and share with others. I know what it’s like to be in friendships and relationships where it feels like everyone else on board has jumped ship.
But I also know the powerfully painful ending of connections that were felt by both parties. The kind of goodbyes we all, or we both, see coming and have to honor. Especially when the ‘goodbyes’, themselves, have not arrived but are still steadily approaching. I think those are some of the hardest goodbyes we say as human beings.
Although this poem wasn’t consciously based on him, I said a similar goodbye to my father. The night I was called to say goodbye to him at the hospital, death had already been settling into his body when I got there. I called his name and watched him try to fight it off to stay alive a little while longer; to get, at least, one last look at me. And he did.
I don’t write about what happened in the room that night, but this is a start. When he finally adjusted his eyes (they had already started rolling up into the back of his head) and looked at me, we had a moment of silence between us full of unspoken words that we both heard perfectly.
He was saying goodbye because he knew he was going to die. And I told him that it was okay for him to leave me because I knew he was going to need the peace of my permission to abandon me to life. The way he emotionally abandoned me the entire time he was raising me.
He died once I left.
I was 17.
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