Poetry With Me

I have never been good at describing love. Love makes me anxious, it makes me wonder, it makes me sad. In moments it makes me happy and overwhelmed with my emotions. In others it makes me feel grief like I’ve lost someone dear to me and had no memories of why they meant so much. Just a gut wrenching feeling of despair that they left me.

How can I describe love to you? To help you to understand it through my eyes.

Can you visualize a man on a balcony with flowers in hand? A woman on a separate balcony happy and content and just an arms length away. A small, but nice, alleyway in between that seems to keep the two apart if no effort is applied?

Can you see this in your minds eye?

Ok, now I want you to envision the man reaching over the balcony. He’s trying to pass the flowers to the woman.

Keep watching.

She smiles and reaches for the flowers but they are slightly too out of reach, so she runs to get a chair to prop up on the balcony. She uses the chair to climb around and she sits on the ledge. Grasping the balcony with one hand and the other reaching for the almost out of reach flowers.

Keep watching.

She finally touches the edge of the stems of the flowers and he jerks the flowers back and laughs. The woman confused loses her balance and falls down the side of the home and lands hard on the ground. She’s hurt, confused and unsure why the man would do that. She’s angry. So she goes inside and slams the door to nurse her wounds.

After some time she goes onto her balcony again. The man is not there.

She gains peace and reads sitting on her porch for many days and nights alone. She is content.

Again the man appears on the balcony full of apologies and shrugs about what happened in the past hoping to move forward and try again.

She agrees as he reaches over with a larger bouquet of flowers and this time she decides she’ll use a scarf to throw and loop around them as she holds on to the ledge. Again he pulls them back each time she almost makes the loop go around the petals. She tries and tries and he does the same thing every time. She loses her grip after multiple attempts and falls again.

Even more hurt and confused she looks up and he’s gone again. Angrily she gets up and wants to storm to bang on his door and demand he stop playing these silly games. But she already feels like a fool so she goes back home and closes the door. Less sure of herself than she was before.

She looks out her living room window and there is the man sitting with another woman on the porch flowers in her hand and his arms wrapped around her.
The woman’s heartbreaks for a man who over and over again let her fall.

She decides to shut her window and never look over there again.

Many years pass and she is finally able to sit on her porch to read. Her heart and ego are bruised but she has survived the fall 2x.

Again appears the man, he comes with deeper heart felt apologies than before. She is wary and doesn’t know if she can trust him this time he climbs over the ledge flowers in hand and reaches towards her. She leans but still can not reach him and so she climbs over cautiously and reaches toward him, the hope still in her heart, while her mind races as to why she would even try and trust him again.

He smiles and she touches the petals of the flowers slowly as he holds them even more outright towards her. A drop of sweat falls from his brow and he takes the hand with the flowers back to wipe it with his sleeve.

Anxiously she holds tighter to the rail feeling her own sweat start to appear. He looks at her again. His smile drops and the look of goodbye is in his eyes.

She is confused but frozen still as she watches the man. He climbs back over the banister and turns his back to her. One last time he looks over his shoulder at her and throws the flowers over the banister and to the ground.

Shocked she just watches as he goes inside and slams the door. It feels as if he let her fall once more.

She realizes as she climbs back to her porch and sits on her couch that this was his way of saying she isn’t worth the effort. She isn’t worth it.

She would never be enough.

She decides to never go on her porch again. To block it off. Even though she knows its there, to her it’s safer to never go there again.

To never read in the summer wind, to never sit and drink coffee while she watches the snow fall. Because he may be there to trick her yet again.

And she’d fall for it every time…

Why you ask? Because over the years as they sat on their respective porches she learned his favorite seasons to sit and read. His favorite moments to come out and watch the stars. His favorite books that he whispered to her through the wind.

She memorized the way the sunset bounced off his skin and the color of his eyes when she caught him watching her sitting there. How his cheeks would just slightly turn red.

No one else who passed by and saw them would know the silent love that passed through them for years or so she thought. And now the passersby would be right.

She does not know the man who stands on the balcony staring at the stars. She never knew the man who lived just across.

This is how love feels and looks through my eyes.

Still in my heart I hope for a love that will not have to be cruel and kind.

With Love,

GV Rioz