The Amazing Story Challenge: Special Heartbreak Edition

Author's Note: So as posted last night, I took a very small break from The Amazing Story Challenge due to matters of the heart. In truth, I had my first heartbreak. I still have it, I cried three times today. I was completely embarrassed because I fell like your first heartbreak is something that happens to you in high school: not in your almost 20's. For two days I just sat in my bed felling physically ill (it also doesn't help that my uterus is throwing its monthly "you're not pregnant" rager). But today I went to see Lianne La Havas, and her music helped me verbalize my feelings about the situation. I told someone that I loved them for the first time, the first time I EVER told someone I loved them... and they told me that there was another girl... and I was so frustrated and hurt because I worked so hard on being able to say those words. i was never able to say them because things like THAT always got in the way. And when I finally said it, it was dashed to bits and treated like it didn't mean anything. It felt like pulling teeth just to say those three words... Because I was never able to tell him that I did love him properly: I wrote him love poems.... and this is my final one. I hope you enjoy it; I feel like a weight has lifted off my chest now that I am able to verbalize how I feel: of course, in poem formation. <3 I hope to restart The Amazing Story Challenge tomorrow. Til Then, I give you my poem. 

What Do You Do With Love Poems, When You Are No Longer In Love? 

By: Hayley Michelle Trachtenberg 

What do you do with love poems, when you are no longer in love?

Do you abandon them? 

Leave them on your ex-lovers doorstep like an orphan? 

Excommunicate your emotions,

Forsake your fondness,

Leave them deserted in the desert to never be found: 

I guess abandonment is always an option. 

But if you abandon them, 

You risk the chance that your words will find a way back to you. 

Crawling on all fours, 

But slowly: 

Like a wounded animal trying to come home to a strangers house.

The words don't feel just right in your mouth anymore,

So you cannot take them back:

And yet,

You cannot send them away again. 

You could always try to kill that part of you that wrote those words, 

But that too will come back: 

But this time like a zombie, 

Undead and unfeeling,

Wanting to eat away at your flesh until you become the walking corpse of the woman you once were.

Love is an infection;

Your poems are the plague,

And yes,

You can run away from your poems, 

But your memories of merriment are a hoard just waiting for you to 

Trip 

Slip 

And fall back in love.

I'm clumsy with my feet and even more so with my heart, 

Once I slipped and found it on your sleeve.... 

So outrunning is out of the question. 

I can try to change my love poems, 

I could try to rearrange them:

Write him out of my story,

But to do that would be to rewrite history: 

And yes, 

It would be easier to forget him entirely,

But I cannot afford the luxury of amnesia.

I have bumps and bruises all over my heart,

And yet I still remember everything.

I could try and drown those emotions, 

But love floats.

I could try to break those words out of their context, 

But it's original meaning would stay intact. 

I could give those love poems away as a gift to someone else,

But they would be false declarations,

Those poems: 

All 16 of them were written for you.

Looking back at it now, 

I wish I had written them for me. 

I cannot travel backwards in time,

Nor can I see into the future.

Me and my love poems are stuck in purgatory, 

I could sentence my sentences to hell,

Banish them from my mouth,

But the ghost of happiness would haunt me like you do now. 

So just what DO you do with love poems once the love runs out?!

I say burn them,

Roll them up into little smokes,

Because love will kill you quicker than cigarettes,

Of this I am sure.

Let the ink on those letters leave stains on your lungs,

Because those tar words will stay inside of you forever where that loving feeling will not. 

I will rot from the inside out,

Starting from my heart and spreading all throughout my body,

Burning my throat until I can no longer perform those now pointless poems,

Because what is the point of a love poem without love? 

A love poem without love is like a sky without its stars,

Or a strawberry without its seeds,

A love poem without love, 

Is like me without you. 

...Me without you...

And I don't want love poems like that.

I never wrote love poems until I met you,

And now I do not think I ever will again.

I know they say it is better to have loved and lost, then never have loved at all,

It's fairytale logic, where heartbreak doesn't ache,

And if this is a fairytale then I want a new writer.

This Cinderella was all dressed up but never made it to the ball, 

Now I am left to walk home on broken glass while my prince dances with another girl. 

You dance with another girl, 

And I can barley move.

You have left me frozen in place with nothing but poems.

Now when I write love poems I don't philosophically debate about what I do with them, 

I just through them directly into the trash. 

So when you start to write her love poems,

Do me a small favor, 

And don't call them that. 

Call them lust poems,

Or maybe "just friends" poems,

Or...

...Or if you do really love her, call them that.

Get stuck in your syrupy sweet words,

Lost in your never ending lyrics.

Write her love poems like I wrote you poems.

And eventually,

When the sweetness turns to sour,

Once the love leaves those letters,

And you are left with a piece of paper and some hollow metaphors,

I want you to run and tell me what you do with your loveless poems. 

Honestly,

I'd love to know.