He Was a Poem, Not a Person

He Was a Poem, Not a Person

Genre: Lyrical Story / Poetic Fiction / Romance

Tone: Intimate, wistful, dreamlike

He was a poem, not a person.

I knew it the moment he looked at me like I was a secret he'd been waiting to remember. His eyes didn’t just look — they lingered, like punctuation between thoughts. He didn’t speak in full sentences. He let his pauses mean more than his words.

He was made of metaphors, too layered to be real. He kissed like an apology and laughed like it was borrowed music. He showed up in my life like a line from a book I hadn’t finished reading. And from the very beginning, I think I knew: he wasn’t meant to stay.

But oh, how I wanted him to.

He loved in phrases.

"I think I was supposed to meet you in another life," he whispered once, tracing circles on my palm.

And I believed him. Not because it made sense, but because it felt like something a poem would say.

He wasn’t the kind of man you could define. He slipped through labels like water through fingers. One moment, he was talking about constellations and the next, about how people leave before they’ve unpacked their hearts.

With him, nothing was ever certain. Except the ache he left behind.

I would ask him what he was thinking, and he’d answer with silence or a story about a dream he had when he was twelve. One where he was flying. One where the sky cracked open and spilled out forgotten memories. I never got straight answers, only lyricism.

But that was the thing — he didn’t exist in straight lines.

He was ellipses.

He was the dot-dot-dot at the end of a message that never arrived.

He was beautiful in the way art is beautiful —

not because it’s perfect,

but because it’s raw, untamed, impossible to explain.

He wore sadness like a scarf, casually but close.

He told me once, “I don’t know how to stay, but I know how to feel.”

I should’ve known then. I should’ve written it down and read it back to myself like a warning.

Instead, I turned him into my favorite stanza.

I remember the way he’d disappear for days — no messages, no reasons. I would imagine he was wandering somewhere, collecting ideas or chasing feelings he hadn’t named yet.

And then, like clockwork, he’d return with wild eyes and a crooked smile, saying something like,

"Did you know the sky is pink at 4 a.m. if you look hard enough?"

I’d want to ask where he went, who he saw, what he was running from —

but I never did.

You don’t ask a poem to explain itself.

He was not real the way furniture is real. The way calendars and promises are real.

He was real the way music is — felt, not held.

He belonged to the world, to everyone and no one.

I tried to hold him, and he vanished. I tried to love him, and he loved the idea of being loved.

He loved being the storm, not the shelter.

And me? I was the reader.

Turning pages, hoping for a chapter that never came.

Sometimes, I wonder if I ever truly knew him, or if I just loved what he let me imagine.

He told me half-truths, wrapped in pretty phrasing.

He said, “I want to love you in ways you haven’t been loved yet,”

but he never asked how I needed to be loved.

He said, “You make me feel like poetry,”

but he never stayed long enough to become a story.

I filled in the blanks for him.

I built the rest of him out of fragments and daydreams.

I wrote him in the margins of my life, even as he drifted from the center of it.

The last time I saw him, he said nothing.

Just smiled, kissed the top of my head like I was a child, and walked away with his hands in his pockets — like endings didn’t matter, like all stories were meant to fade mid-line.

I didn’t chase him.

Maybe because I finally realized:

He was never mine to lose.

Only to remember.

Now, I think of him the way you think of a song that once made you cry.

Not with longing, but with gratitude.

He taught me that beauty isn’t always meant to last. That some people come to awaken something in you, not to stay beside you.

He was a poem.

Brief, beautiful, aching.

And I? I was just the page he passed through.

But I don’t regret him.

Because now, when I write, I understand rhythm. I understand how some words don’t rhyme but still belong together.

I understand that some people are verses, and others are punctuation —

and very few get to be the whole book.

He was not my book.

But he was a line I’ll never forget.