The Song Still Gets Me
Poetry and Prose by Britt Wolfe
It’s been more than ten years,
and still—
the opening chords undo me.
I wasn’t even thinking of you today.
I was doing something ordinary—
laundry, maybe,
or walking home with too much on my mind.
And then the song came on,
your song,
and suddenly the years collapsed like paper.
There are still people I might run into—
old friends, old faces,
versions of my life that kept going.
But not you.
Never you.
You will never appear in a grocery store aisle,
never wave from across a street,
never post a photo of a child,
or a wedding,
or an expensive thing you bought just because you could.
You will never tell me about a promotion,
or an adventure,
or the time you almost moved away but didn’t.
You are gone in every possible tense.
And still,
I think of what we would have argued about—
the new Metric album,
some movie you loved that I pretended not to.
I think of all the mundane miracles
we were supposed to grow into.
But you stopped.
You stopped everything.
And the rest of us had to learn
how to keep turning pages
after the story ran out of ink.
Now, whenever Stars comes on,
I stop breathing for a moment.
Not out of reverence—
out of recognition.
Because the song still belongs to you,
and it always will.
The world has moved on,
but the music hasn’t.
It keeps playing,
as if it doesn’t know
you’re not here to hear it.
And maybe that’s the saddest part—
that sound can outlive you.
That memory can sing.
That grief can still have a melody
after all this time.
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Poetry Anthologies by Britt Wolfe
