Everyone tells you to marry your best friend.
But what that don’t tell you
is that he could die,
And without a body to bind the two parts together,
you’ll have to keep on loving and grieving twice over–
once for the ring missing from your finger
and once for the knots of a heart unraveled.
Everyone tells you when it’s too early to date,
not realizing that you are an expert in too early.
It was too early for him to die.
Sometimes it’s too early to breathe.
Everyone tells you a watched pot never boils,
and not to look for love.
But you might want to look for love
because your best friend would expect you to be loved,
no matter what happened to your husband.
And your best friend is dead now,
And you’ll want to be as strong as he thought you were.
You might want to date
because eating alone isn’t for everyone,
and some people need an excess of love to digest properly.
You might want to date because
love, and being loved, and loving is your inheritance to spend.
And what a shame it’d be to let it slip away.
You might want to date even though everyone says a watched pot never boils,
because a pot on a shelf doesn’t boil either.
You might end up dating people who don’t know marriage, who don’t know him, who don’t know you.
People who don’t know you are everything.
You were his, everything.
Everyone says you are a widow,
because girls who lose their best friend
don’t get a word.
You’ll have to date with the wrong label on your skin,
lower yourself over the flames and hope the heat burns it off when you drop yourself back on the stove.
Hope the boiling makes you forget.
Hope the boiling helps you remember
that everyone isn’t always right.
But they were right once.
Marry your best friend.
Just remember that he could die,
And that hearts can unravel,
And loose memories will float through your insides and tangle in your blood, and your body won’t remember how to act without the constant pulling of your matching soul.
Just remember that you might want to date,
and might want to find a different kind of love.
And sometimes in the middle of kisses
or laughter,
one of those severed knots will clog your arteries,
and you’ll die a little,
But not enough to escape new love or old.
Just remember that sometimes you’ll find someone
who loves you
but their eyes will forget to tell you that
you are everything.
So you might have to remind them,
and you might have to leave them,
and you might have to put yourself back on the stove.
But it’s worth it
because
You were made to boil.
You were made to spill over.
You deserve someone who wants you enough
to reach out and risk the burn.
Someone who loves you enough
to remember the man they never met,
and love him
for keeping you so safe and warm.
Someone who calls when they get home,
to say they love you,
and leaves enough space between those lines
so that you both can hear–
we are still alive.
we are still alive.
Because it’s too early to forget you could die,
and because being alive and being in love
means two people are holding onto your best friend
and maybe this time, with the help,
you can finally keep him, safe.
__________________________
This was to the prompt “Everyone tells you”. What does everyone tell YOU? (Day two of mostly-written poems I could never quite get right.)
