This is it: your happily ever after,
your beginning of the end of it,

all happy. The line between
Before and After. This is what
you’ve chosen, this one before all others

Your once upon a time. Nothing
makes sense to me. You tell me

a story of your youth. Why you don’t like
cucumbers: how you raided the fields
and ate them on a hot hot day, your

army buddies beside you on the back
of a truck. I don’t know where you were

going, where you were coming from.
Really, I know nothing. When I talk about
naming myself you say you don’t want

to be known. You tell me you wish
she had been different from what she was

that she held you back from what
you wanted. But once you wanted her.
It’s so hard to believe in love since love

was what fell away from you. Her diary
about falling in love with you. All that hope,

that youth, how beautiful you were to her.
I didn’t know this was all about you.
I make my own happy ending of it all.