Space age love song

Emma Burden | Fall 2022

“I guess it was all going just a little too well
If I wasn’t careful I’d be happy pretty soon”
When I saw your face for the first time,
Golden in the light,
I knew I’d prayed for a woman like you, but
“Heaven’s no place for one who thrives on hell,
One who prefers the bit to the silver spoon.”
I started to write about you,
It was the first time I was vulnerable on the page,
Working out the feelings of gay or straight, love or adoration, if you were my friend or
something more
I wrote about you because you didn’t speak,
Your love was in an envelope,
Its corners licked and stuck together,
Your love was a multi-page letter,
College ruled sheets with my chicken scratch handwriting,
I never let you open it
And I changed my life to run away from you,
To see you through a lens of prose,
That you couldn’t do anything wrong, not if you were so kin to novelistic heroines,
The ones who love a little too easy,
I was staring in a mirror, and my smile was yours,
Except you had brighter teeth
“She is like a fantasy. The inevitability of her escape is most likely her most attractive feature.”
In the same way that I ran from you, you ran from me,
Into the arms of a man much younger,
Into the arms of someone who had never written,
Did he think of you in the same way that I had?
The same way that I do?
How harrowing that it is to think, that I wrote you as somebody else,
That when I look back at those letters, I write of hatred for you in one,
And forgiveness in another
“Frightening awful silences. Hiding behind all those mannerisms and quiet, crouched down
behind herself. Unfiltered cigarettes, beer, broads and lumberjack shirts.”
You always smelled like nicotine,
And conditioner, and linen, and freshly washed clothes,
And on your mouth there was the clean scent of vodka,
I remember the kisses,
I remember the way that our lips moved,
And I remember feeling nothing
But, I still remember trying to continue loving you,
When you were in love with someone else.
You kissed me three times during three different relationships and didn’t tell me about any of
them,
Your unfaithfulness was a forgotten secret, hiding so lowly in your chest, that when you kissed
me I felt nothing,
Not out of my loss of love,
But out of your own guilt,
That I hadn’t discovered yet
“I wish you would love me more so that I could love you less.”
The constellation of Virgo hung high over my head, and someone’s mother lit a cigarette,
And I stood in the darkness, under the dogwood tree,
On the uneven gravel,
And I started crying.
I had never told someone else that I loved you, I had only written it down.
And two years later, I wrote it down on paper one last time,
And I read that paper to you.
You can imagine how that went.
One day, I’ll apologize to your girlfriend that I didn’t know was your girlfriend at the time,
I’ll apologize for telling her I was in love with you,
I’ll apologize to her for our affair, the one that I didn’t know was an affair
My first love involved me ruining someone else’s first love
I think she looked at you in a way that said,
“I’m sorry it’s not Emma—it could’ve been. It should’ve been. It might’ve meant something.
Maybe not much, but certainly more.”