3 AM

You spoke in certainties and absolutes,
Your "always" and "nevers" and "impossibles"
Pouring out of you as quickly as the tears
that leaped from your eyelashes to smear on your
glasses as you cried to me in the driver's seat of your car.

We were parked outside, poised and ready to go in,
to have coffee together, to have that talk we had
been saving up for one another, like a trust fund,
emotions and words building up and up and up
just waiting to be cashed in. We had both been

hoping for the right moment and weren't even
aware when it presented itself, until that car ride
at 3 AM, where we didn't even make it to that cup
of coffee but drank deep all morning from each other's remorse.
And now, here we are, here I am,

hoping to assuage your absolutes and teach
you my grey matter. The "sometimes,"
the "unknowns," the "maybes," the words
that speak to the nuances of the possibilities
of endless optimistic versions of our futures.

But all I could do in the car was cry with you
and hold your hand, steeling my walls just a bit more
while at the same time feeling my heart
soften back into the putty
it once was, as I held you in my arms,

waking up in the same position in which I fell asleep,
looking into your eyes and wanting, wishing, hoping,
that it was all just a bad dream and that you and I
were still where we had been, in love,
but knowing, understanding, and growing from the

knowledge that it wasn't the same. And even though
we aren't where we were, we are where we are now
and have determination to grasp where we could be,
amidst the jungle of absolutes and qualifiers,
of tears and cups of coffee, of sleepless nights

and the uncertain, yet promising future of endless tomorrows.