To April, or the Wheel of Fortune
You will meet him one summer, or one winter, it doesn’t matter
What matters is you won’t see it coming.
He’ll come crashing in like treefall
An avalanche of foliage as life,
Ancient and long-forgotten,
Floods in wet and bright and new.
You’ll set everything on fire just to let him through.
These things needed to burn anyway, of course.
You are growing a different forest now
but I need you to know it was there before,
it was only waiting
for force, circumstance, or this.
I won’t call it love. I’ll explain later.
But you’ll thank him for it, as though he’s the Fate that binds you.
As though an afternoon spent laughing in the sun isn’t actually yours,
Just the way his light refracts, bounces off you.
It makes you look good, doesn’t it?
No wonder he calls you radiant.
He’ll show you a song and it’ll be like you’d never heard music.
Play his half-hearted chords while you lie there watching.
You lived 19 years without so much as knowing his name and
They’re nothing in the face of this.
The way he sounds on your tongue.
I won’t call it love. I’ll explain later.
I need you to remember something.
These things you see him see in you
the potential, the first trembling verse on the page,
They were always there. They always will be.
I’m telling you this because Fortuna is fickle
I’m telling you this because I know what comes next.
He has a Scottish summer’s attention span
Do not resent your family for bringing you home,
Thank Fate, not him,
for sparing you of an alternate scenario
In which this, not love
Either never happened,
Or kept happening.
You’ll let his friends stay on your blow-up mattress
He’ll hold you for three nights
Disappear in the morning
to undefined numbers of new things.
You’d never imagined
That silence would be the spear to pierce you.
You who are so loud it makes him, them, wince.
You will look for him, not him
The him feeling him again
in empty evangelists
radical bookshops
train stations and acrobats
manufacturing chemistry
crumbling
until two years later
you’ll run into him again
and he won’t recognize your face
I am telling you this because I need you to know
that this is not love
I told you I’d get here eventually.
I am sorry it wasn’t soon enough to push you out of the way of this collision
Protect your youth for Ten more minutes
The Wheel doesn’t take requests.
This is not love.
I hear love is something that happens when you’re not paying attention
Less a forest fire and more the gentle breath
Of a really good conversation
Maybe it even feels like, for once,
Things don’t need to spin so quickly
So when you finally stare across from him
Watching him meet the next girl you once were
Remember
You are the poet not the page
the Earth not its rotation
Hold hands with me, repeat:
He is not love he is not love he is not love
You are.