So you want to know about the one that got away? The one that reached her hand down my throat & ripped my heart clean out? To tell this story, is to confess to my darkness. To tell this story, is to surrender into the light of a heart breaking open. To tell this story, is to turn back time to the moment we lay on the blue rug on the floor of her Windsor apartment - fingers intertwined, eyes locked, heartbeats synchronized. Her sweet whisper reminding me that those versions of us are eternal, frozen in that split-second capsule of time. What a fool I am in love. A love so profound & transformative, it is criminal to be reckless with it… I am as reckless as they come. You see, the one that got away, is also the reason I came home to myself. Do you know what it’s like to be the villain of your own story? To love with an open heart, only to incinerate that very love with the embers of distorted desires, of sabotage, of self-betrayal? A love that undresses your deepest wounds spares no yearning in its wake, & I am a yearner yearning. The one that got away is a poem that used to roll off my tongue, but now wedges itself in my throat making me choke every time I try to tell the tale. Perhaps, the one that got away is somehow still a part of me - living inside my bones as a deep echo of the time we never got to have, flowing inside my bloodstream like an intoxicant. A trick puzzle that cannot be solved. A faraway dream, slipping through my fingers like the sand on the shores along Sleeping Bear dunes. One of the last few moments of union & of devotion, still intact & not robbed by the wicked game time likes to play with memory. My dearest friend, my worst enemy. A slow turning knife lodged into my spine. I am speaking in tongues because it’s the only way I know how. The one that got away, is now married to a man she told me not to worry about once. That kind of lore cannot be explained in plain speak, unfortunately. This is all for now.