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you don’t always find out that hearts can be
made out of helium balloons
until you see your own,
slightly bruised and separated from his.

it doesn’t always occur to you soon enough that
sometimes he is too scared to tell you
(that even though his love leaves water rings and
construction paper crinkles of
perfection)
your love became more of a funeral,
where he cannot know what he had until
it’s gone and he is standing
in a room with his best friends and pretty girls
and some furniture with ashtrays and CD cases.
he’ll wonder then where you are and
why ‘you and him’ should have meant
multiplication, not curved edges and dotdotdot
and maybe that’s when he’ll miss you because

you can’t fully understand something when you just
don’t know.

just like he doesn’t know that you didn’t believe
his roof-top slant of “I will never” until he said “trust me” –and you did.
just like he didn’t see your heart write a novel all about
his blue eyes and fingertips walking out agreements to his proposals
and just like how his heart changed without
warning and yours made a brick wall landing
because of it.

so without him I am not less
and I am not oh-so-weak
and I can breathe fine because I could before

but sometimes you have to realize your friend was right when she said it’s possible
to find the right person at the wrong time and
the only thing you can do is hope
that later on it will still be the right person but now it’s
at the right time
because love comes back
if it ever was to go M.I.A.
it will return once whatever was missing, wasn’t really missing,
but just misunderstood and now you can continue.

life doesn’t end because of a boy.
your ‘single girl’ independence means you had
four walls and a roof already
and if someone you love leaves doesn’t mean
he cracked the dry wall and made you fall,

you had a choice to be strong
and that’s not a cliché.

it means there are too many other women who
know your heart because it reminds them of themselves
and they would say to be strong,
to be whole and complete without him because
you are worth more than a helium balloon heart
and the boy that finds that out
will be the one to prove it to you and never

change his mind.

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