Read more poetry by Britt Wolfe
There was a moment,
small enough to be ashamed of,
when grief mistook itself
for betrayal.
When the silence felt so personal
I almost believed
you had meant it.
And I thought,
So this is how you win.
I always knew
you held the final card.
I just never imagined
you would play it.
Not like this.
Not with so much
still left unsaid.
I know.
I know you didn't choose this.
That the world does not arrange
its endings
around the things
we have yet to forgive.
But for one terrible moment,
I could not understand
how you could leave
when there was still
so much of us
left to mend.
And oh,
how I wished
for one more ordinary day.
Not to settle anything.
Not to make us
into something
we had never managed to be.
Just to exist
in the same world
a little longer.
Because I had survived
so many versions
of losing you.
I had learned
to live with the distance,
to carry the questions,
to make peace
with the possibility
that nothing might ever change.
But somewhere beneath it all,
I had kept a little room
for tomorrow.
For the chance
that time might soften
what love could not.
And now
there is no tomorrow
in which to find you.
No final conversation.
No sudden understanding.
No reaching across
the years between us.
Only the terrible tenderness
of knowing
that even after everything,
I would have welcomed
one more imperfect day.
And perhaps
that is what I meant
when I thought
you had won.
Not that you had hurt me.
Not that you had meant to.
Only that
I had spent so long
learning how to live
without you,
and never once
learned how to live
in a world
where you were gone.
And here I am,
breaking for you
one final time.
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Poetry by Britt Wolfe:
What happens when someone you've spent so long learning to live without becomes someone you must learn to live without forever? Breaking for You One Final Time explores the fleeting, irrational sense of betrayal that can accompany an irreversible goodbye, when grief feels almost deliberate and all the possibilities of tomorrow disappear at once. It is a deeply intimate reflection on unfinished relationships, the fragile hope of reconciliation, and the devastating realization that even after all the hurt, the distance, and the things left unsaid, love never really went anywhere. For anyone who has ever made peace with someone's absence, only to discover they were never prepared for the permanence of it.