I walked away, and everything was fine.
I walked away, and under some trees.
I stopped to look up at the dying leaves,
shaped like hearts, listing in the breeze.
The wind picked up, and one floated free.
It landed perfectly in front of me.
From that moment on my heart weighed heavy.
I only wonder what it all could mean.
***
Published 10/14/09
Boy did I have to read through a lot of stream of consciousness between that last poem and OCTOBER of the same year. I didn’t really date in high school; one girl I saw for all of a single marching band season, another for like two months after that, and my life-long crush had just started dating someone when I asked her out. That was pretty much the extent of my romantic life in high school.
Here, I’m halfway through my first college semester. A lot of my classmates have attended the same university, and this poem in particular is about a girl I hadn’t seen since middle school. There’s a lot to be said about the relationship we had through and after college, but it was not particularly healthy. I was non-committal, and she was too quick to commit. We’ve stayed in touch, though. It would be hard to say I still have feelings for her, but she is definitely one of the first “real” relationships I had as an “adult.”
This is a quite literal poem. I had just given her our usual farewell hug/kiss see you after the next block of classes thing, and I was walking between the Engineering Building and Library on campus. Something felt off, and it was shortly after this we stopped seeing each other for awhile. I would have to go confirm the tree species, but I believe it was a type of “lime” tree. At the very least, those are the closest to the leaf shape I could find.
Also, writer tip #367 employed here: the end question is of course rhetorical. You know exactly what it means, and my intuition was correct. I still do that, so it’s good to see(?) a habit I developed early sticks around in some fashion.
Rampant Swan 