When we talk next,
I’ll tell you everything.
Remember when you told me
about the beauty of it all?
How the waves collide and the foams rise?
And how all of it falls in one place or falls apart?
I didn’t understand it then
But now I do.
I actually went on that Coogee to Bondi walk,
the one you swore I would love.
And you were right.
It’s become my favourite place.
So, I sat there with a loud silence
wrapped around me like a warm blanket
that still smells like “we.”
When we talk next,
I will tell you how much I have spoken
to the shadows that resemble you
And how much this tender touch of time
teases my memory
just enough to ache,
but never enough to hold.
If I had known
you came just to leave,
I might have prayed on every shooting star
to have never met you.
But then again,
I still would have.
If I had known
I was hugging you for the last time,
I would have held you a little longer
Just in case the world was kind enough
to pause for me.
And,
if I had known
I was meeting you for the last time,
I would have held you harder,
hushed every hurry,
and
never let you go.
When we talk next,
I will ask you a series of unimportant questions.
Like,
Do you pause when a song we both liked suddenly plays?
Do you let that familiar flicker of forgotten feelings
sit beside you for even a second?
Do you still trace my name
on your car’s fogged-up mirror?
Because I do.
When we talk next,
I will tell you how much I stare
at the cracked cutlery with chipped edges
the ones we never threw away.
Still reminder of things we held onto,
even when they stopped holding us.
That things, even broken
still belong.
When we talk next,
I will tell you how no one fits
into the empty spaces of my fingers
as perfectly as yours did.
When we talk next,
I will tell you how the Coogee and the Bondi oceans
still whisper your name, your laugh,
the things you left unsaid
in half sentences and full hearts.
When we talk next,
I will tell you how much I still look for you
In people,
In places,
In poems,
I never finished.
When we talk next,
I will tell you everything.
Or
Maybe
I won’t need to.
