As we stand on opposite sides,
just like we always have,
I look into those eyes, which caught me
like a spider’s woven web.

He looks back,
a face I know too well;
a life I see through too quickly.
His expression’s never changed.

A love grown from three days of magic,
eight months of pain.
His smile twisting around me,

I kept letting him catch me
again and again,
forcing me to fight.
Now I’m exhausted from this struggle.

So as he stands across the tracks,
and looks me in the eyes,
what does he see?

A tired girl,
messy and too different?
Or a fighter?
A girl whose strength hurts her.

I look at him:
that hideous sweatshirt,
the red backpack,
the mussed brown waves,
the pink lips that have spoken too many lies.

And I still wish he were mine.
But he only stares back,
with the same gaze which has haunted me
since that enchanted February night.

I lift the cell to my ear, still looking to the other side
and ask a simple question
to the friend. ‘Did you talk to him today?’
But the heavy reply holds all the other answers

that I had been looking for.
The voice replies,
with the weight of the world,
‘Yes.’

All the words,
the dreams,
the memories
crash and shatter,
before my eyes.

But then,
standing in the rubble,
I finally realize
that this fairytale won’t have a happily ever after.

It’s the never-ending story of
constant love and
constant torment;
not of a hero.

So, on an unusually warm October day,
I’ll finally close the cover
of our words- those which have haunted me for months.
Sometimes the princess has to
slay the dragon alone.

He’s not my fairytale;
just a lesson
I had to learn,
to write it.