Unfinished (But Still Over)

Read more poetry by Britt Wolfe

I used to believe
that things ended
when there was nothing left of them.

When every word had been spoken,
every promise had been kept,
every possibility had been lived
until there was nowhere else to go.

I thought an ending
was something you arrived at.

Not something that arrived
while you were busy
making other plans.

But I've learned
that life is not particularly concerned
with whether we're ready.

There are conversations
that will never be finished,
apologies that will never be offered,
forgiveness that will never be asked for,
and people who leave this world
with tomorrow still written
all over their lives.

There are birthdays on calendars,
half-read books beside beds,
cups left in cupboards
by hands that will never reach for them again.

There are things we meant to say
when the time was right.

And the terrible thing
is that we thought
there would be a right time.

I keep coming back
to everything unfinished.

The ordinary things.
The important things.
The things I didn't even know
I would one day wish
I'd paid attention to.

I think about the last conversations
that weren't supposed to be last conversations.

The doors we walked through
without looking back.

The people we loved imperfectly,
believing there would be years
to learn how to love them better.

And I want to argue
with the finality of it all.

I want to say
that there must be some mistake.

That surely something
with so much left to give,
so much left to become,
so much left to mend,
cannot simply be over.

Not while there are questions.
Not while there is love.
Not while some part of me
is still waiting
for what comes next.

But the world does not negotiate
with unfinished things.

It doesn't return the time
we thought we had.
It doesn't reopen doors
because we finally know
what we would have said.

And perhaps the cruelest part
is that nothing inside us
ends at the same time.

The love stays.
The anger stays.
The hope, impossibly, stays.

We keep reaching
for what is no longer there,
keep saving stories
for people who will never hear them,
keep imagining futures
that have already been taken away.

And somehow,
we are expected to accept
that all of this can still exist
inside something
that is over.

I don't know how to do that.

I don't know how to look
at all the life that might have been
and stop calling it a beginning.

I don't know how to stop believing
that unfinished things
are supposed to be finished.

But I'm learning.

Slowly.
Reluctantly.
With a heart that keeps insisting
there must be more.

I'm learning that acceptance
isn't understanding why.

It isn't finding the beauty
in something terrible,
or convincing myself
that what happened
was somehow meant to happen.

It's knowing
that I can spend the rest of my life
wishing for another moment
and never be given one.

That I can have so much left to say
and no one left to say it to.

That I can love something
long after its last breath,
its last chance,
its last goodbye.

And that perhaps
the hardest truth
I will ever have to live with
is that something can be
so painfully, impossibly unfinished—

and still
be over.

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Poetry by Britt Wolfe: