All to Well

You climbed my walls like ivy.

A moment that felt enchanted,

though you weren’t always fearless,

You have a demure that says, “Who is afraid of little old me”.

Still, something in your gorgeous laugh

pulled me straight into danger.

I should’ve known

you were trouble

from the way my pulse said your name

before I could.

I told myself: “You need to calm down”.

I did something bad

Our love wasn’t allowed,

so we lived it guilty as sin,

hiding in the lavender haze,

letting borrowed time feel permanent.

You kept your heart guarded,

I kept pretending I wasn’t unraveling,

and together we pretended the world

wasn’t waiting to split us apart.

But I hope that you’re not sorry.

You were a mastermind,

even in the softest ways,

weaving moments like threads,

building a secret world

where sparks were allowed to fly.

And when they did,

it was the room lighting up

just because you walked into it.

It was like you were bejeweled.

You left no body, no crime.

I knew everything has changed.

I bought you the red scarf,

the one that wasn’t just fabric

but a timestamp

of a season I still ache for.

Long story short,

it held your warmth

longer than I ever did.

It was no sweet nothing.

And All Too Well

became the soundtrack

of everything we couldn’t say out loud.

Every lyric sliced a little deeper,

a slow death by a thousand cuts,

yet I played it anyway,

just to feel us

in the spaces between the chords.

Remembering the way I loved you.

I folded a scrap of hope

into a paper ring,

because loving you

didn’t need gold

just a heartbeat

You wore it like you might stay.

But now you’re on your own, Kid.

We weren’t perfect,

but you were beyond

my wildest dreams,

and for a while

I got to call you friend

and something more,

something brighter.

It was nice

just having you as a friend

even when everything else

was hard to hold.

While my love for you is bigger than the whole sky,

I wasn’t your savior,

never the shining one.

I became the anti-hero,

the one who loved too hard,

too openly,

too wrong for the world around us.

But even then

you saw something in me

I didn’t know how to keep.

I remember your hair,

red like autumn fires,

your quiet smile,

the way you said my name

like it wasn’t a mistake.

No bad blood

Just the memory soft like a cardigan,

still warm,

still threaded with what-ifs

and the pieces we dropped along the way.

This is our love story,

the secret one

the world wasn’t willing to witness.

But I’ve made my peace.

I know we will never ever get back together.

I have to shake it off.

I can do it with a broken heart.

It is sad beautiful tragic.

I have closure now

not the kind that erases,

but the kind that lets me breathe

without a blank space.

A love in red.

A song on repeat.

A last kiss.

A scarf waiting on a shelf.

A boy and a girl

caught between wanting

and the world’s refusal

to let them stay.

And evermore I will remember it

all too well.