You is You

When did you become you?
When did I first impart you with the weight of
all the force that accompanies that tiny word?
When did the letters form themselves in my
mind with the pattern of your face, your
absorbing eyes, your expressive brow?
Was it really only in that moment when
you shook me awake, sick and asleep in your bed
when you came home to tell me you
were done with me?
Was it really only in the moment of letting go,
Of knowing I'd needed your arms more than
ever in that moment that my heart finally
cried out - and did it only cry out when it
faced the precipice above your haunting absence?
Or was it earlier, in a subtler time,
when I leaned over and kissed you at stop lights
or when I held you close on our last date together,
seeing a show I was so excited to share with you -
the first of many, I had hoped -
Or when you painted that you loved me on the
wall of my new home - where in the strings of
my heart was that chord struck, the chord that
rings so loudly now I'm sure you cannot
help but hear it, and why was I so keen to
silence it? To hold you apart, as if in protection from
all the hurt I had ever experienced and projected
onto myself? Were you not, in that tiny,
beautiful moment, with your patient eyes
and contagious, childlike, puppy-like smile
merely conveying feelings of affection, but
perhaps trying to toss me a final lifeline before
I let myself sink beneath the waves of your
eventual apathy and subsequent erasure of my
very nature from your private spaces?
And yet, you became you so quickly.
The moment I looked up and realized
it had to have been you for far too long
for me to sit here for such a time as this
and feel the ache, the familiar ache,
that now I know is only here for you.
I suppose now it doesn't matter when it was,
as you are not the you I have, but only
the memory I hold. But now you know,
that you is you,
is you, is you, is you.
I love.