Sincerely, Jennifer x

Our eyes met across the tarted up towel display,

and my stomach was a lepidopterarium.

Loudly, the silence sang as we stood,

oceans and perfumes apart,

lost, but found again, in the middle of John Lewis.

What should I say?

Should I even say?

Can I even stay?

Questions.

Questions.

Questions.

No answers,

no purchases in my basket and no brains in my head,

just the dread of the fluttering, fantastical affair I had begged to forget,

wrapping it’s arms around my lonely, old shoulders as time stood still.

I became a song writer,

just in case you fell in love with me.

I wanted to be like the balding, bastard man you told everyone you liked,

so you’d blush at a poster of me in the middle of Heat Magazine,

but I knew you didn’t like to venture too far from the familiar,

so I fashioned myself after the one I despised,

designing myself in his awful image,

just in case.

In any case,

it was my eyes that you found, after all of these years,

and he’s still writing the same four chords about the same four things,

so maybe I will do?

No, this will not do.

I don’t do this anymore,

and I don’t belong in this neighbourhood,

or this department store,

even with my diamond rings and my freshly pressed summer dress.

It’s winter and I’m dressed to impress,

dressed to kill my own self esteem when I journey home alone,

that sentimental staring contest, replaying in my head,

in the back of a luxury car that feels no better than a bus.

I made it, in the end.

Crying in my childhood Irish bar,

over nothing but my rearranged dreams.

Crowing to cope,

lost in Las Vegas,

but home in time for tea,

with a rotation of pretty things on my arm and in my sheets.

Much like the luxury car,

it feels no better than the lonely lack of you.