Spilled Ink from the Vault

You never loved me.  

You lusted, yes,
and you will spend your years
seeking me between other sheets.
Submitting will nevermore taste as sweet.

You might not be capable
of romantic love, but I believed you —
more fool me — when you offered higher loves.
More, I believed your friendship
could outlive dying embers.

I try to write a poem
to explain the way I wonder if you laugh,
if I have become the butt of a joke 
over a beer with your real friends.
She fell in love. As if 
that would ever work out. She thought
I cared about her. The sex was great,
but who wants to be in a relationship
with an emotional woman?

I try to write the poem, 
and I realise the irony.  I have become 
my favourite bridge, 
a bridge you’d only burn because its author
is another emotional woman.
Nevertheless:
you come away with a great little story
of a mess of a dreamer with the nerve to adore you.

You use the nursing we. You write that 
we deserved a better ending. 
Indeed, I did deserve better, and I still do.
I deserved respect.
I deserve love.
I deserved not to be gaslit by someone who knows better.
I deserved a safe space to be real and raw.
You? You deserve to sit there wanting closure,
wanting me to reach out, so you can fumble
yet another vague apology that truly means nothing.
You do not deserve me.
So you can keep your warm regard
in that cold heart of yours.

My closure is this: in your treason
you unknit every piece of healing you’d offered me.
The wounds are still fresher than I’d like.  If
I didn’t love you still, perhaps they’d be less fetid.
But they will heal.  And I will heal.
And your messages this week did hold value:
they came exactly as I predicted they would.
I always did know you better 
than you know yourself.
Maybe you should take that to therapy,
but it is no longer my place to care
if you learn from your mistakes.