Piggy Banks And Pocket Squares

You once gave me a bank
in the shape of Goofy—
all crooked smile and empty head.
I fed it pennies,
collected from hands both kind and distracted,
tucked them in like wishes
until the plastic body grew heavy with hope.

When it was full,
I rolled them—one by one—
copper dreams turned paper-thin.
Nineteen dollars.
Which meant nothing.
But the bank meant everything.
Because it was from you.
And I believed in you.

Years later,
on the day you stood in a suit and said forever,
you handed me a pocket square.
“Give this to your husband one day.”
I kept it.
Tucked it away.
Hauled it across provinces, across oceans—
Vancouver to Cairns,
stuffed in boxes,
kept with careful hands.

He wore it,
on a beach of blue and vows.
Because what mattered to me
mattered to him.
Because you mattered to me.

I sent you a photo.
You didn’t remember.
Didn’t recall the cloth,
the gesture,
the promise.
I should have known then.

But I didn’t.
Because I still saw you
in that Goofy-shaped bank.
I still thought
you were someone
worth filling with trust.

Then came the unraveling.
Not a snap—
a slow, awful tear
through every soft place I’d left for you.

The stories you told—
not just wrong,
but tilted,
skewed until you stood
at the centre of some imagined injustice
and we—
the rest of us—
were shadows cast by your light.

But you weren’t a light.
You were a mirror
warped by resentment.

You spoke of lack
like it was a crown you wore alone.
But the rest of us
ate from the same table.
Walked the same roads.
Felt the same cold.

Still, you called yourself wounded
as you cut.
Stole from the very hands
that reached for you.
Dismantled bridges
and called it architecture.

And then you stood—
above the wreckage—
smiling,
telling the world
you were the one who fell.

The truth bent so far in your mind,
it formed a noose
around every memory I still held tender.

I don’t know if this is who you always were,
or who you became.
If time twisted you,
or if I was just too good
at lying to myself.

It doesn’t matter.

What matters is this:
I bled.
Not from the sharpness of what you did—
though God, that cut deep—
but from the grief
of loving someone
who looked at that love
and set it on fire.

I believed in you.

And you—
with steady hands—
dragged that belief to the ground,
knelt beside it,
and drove the knife in
while whispering that you were the one in pain.

You told the story wrong.

But I remember.
The bank.
The square.
The weight of your voice
when it still carried kindness.

And the ache now
is that I wish
it had been enough
to save you from yourself.