Goodbye

And in the last moments, even with a dictionary in front of me,
My tongue still flails around, lost for words,
Because whatever I say, the words don’t quite taste right;
The letters don’t settle properly in the air,
And so I keep snatching them back before your ears can catch them,
Until all we can do is stare at each other in silence,
Everything we want to say tangled in our vocal cords.

Our remaining seconds drip through like the water in a leaky faucet.
I once told you I wished we could freeze time,
But now I realise that even if we had,
Clasping the ice in my palms would only make it melt faster,
And no matter how tightly I pressed my fingers together, water would ooze through anyway.
There are only so many times I can squeeze the life out of you with my hugs
Before I start to wonder if maybe I’m suffocating you.

I know you don’t know this, but that night, I released a piece of my heart into the sky,
So that, from now on, whenever you wake up to a scarlet-dyed sunrise
You might just be reminded of me,
Because it’s finally dawning on me that this is what goodbye truly means.
Forever isn’t supposed to come to an end, and yet here we are;
The last grain of sand is about to slip through the hourglass, join the rest.
I wish I could slip through and be with you that way,
But the neck is too thin, and maybe it’s for the best.
The pen is out of ink, the book is out of pages.
Did we write too much? Did we read too fast?

Please visit, even if it’s only in my dreams.