I’m Sorry You Couldn’t Be Here
Poetry and Prose by Britt Wolfe
I wanted you to see it—
all of it.
The small, shimmering ordinary
that makes up a life.
The mornings that smell like coffee and forgiveness,
the heartbreaks that taught me gentleness,
the laughter that built me back up again.
You should have been here
for the messy middle,
for the miracles disguised as monotony,
for the thousand tiny chances
to be someone who stayed.
I wanted you to be here
when it rained too long
and I forgot what sunlight felt like.
I wanted you to be here
when it finally broke through.
But you were always somewhere else—
inside your storms,
inside your own undoing,
building fires in places meant for shelter.
It took me years to understand
you weren’t taken from me—
you left.
You left in the slow, invisible ways
that only broken people know how to leave.
You left in the middle of conversations,
in apologies that never made it past your teeth,
in the silence that grew
like ivy over everything we once were.
I still catch myself wanting to tell you things—
how the light hits the windows now,
how I’ve started sleeping again,
how I’m learning to stay
even when it hurts.
But I know you couldn’t be here.
Not because you didn’t want to,
but because you never learned how.
The weight of your own chaos
was too heavy to carry and still reach for mine.
So I keep living,
and I mourn you quietly—
not as someone who died,
but as someone who couldn’t live enough to stay.
And in the softest hours,
when the world goes still,
I whisper into the dark:
I wish you could have been here.
You would have loved
the life we were meant to have.
Keep My Words Alive
If this poem has stayed with you, you can help keep my words alive or explore more of my work. Every bit of support helps carry the stories forward.
Where words meet morning light
Begin each day with something beautiful
Every morning at 7:11AM, I send a poem — sometimes soft, sometimes devastating, always true.
💚 Subscribe now to read and breathe and feel along with me 💚
Poetry Anthologies by Britt Wolfe
