Replay - The Things We Become When We Leave

2023-11-25

This is a repeat of one of my more popular poems, replayed with the hope of getting a new audience, who might have missed it. "I have gone, love, now let me go." We are all changeable creatures. 50 billion of our cells die every day, physically we are not the same today as we were yesterday. And that irrefutable truth seeps into the very core of our beings. Every day, we change as persons too - imperceptibly, almost surreptitiously: the people we meet, the experiences we s...

This is a repeat of one of my more popular poems, replayed with the hope of getting a new audience, who might have missed it.

"I have gone, love,

now let me go."

We are all changeable creatures. 50 billion of our cells die every day, physically we are not the same today as we were yesterday. And that irrefutable truth seeps into the very core of our beings. Every day, we change as persons too - imperceptibly, almost surreptitiously: the people we meet, the experiences we stumble into, what our senses see, what scares our heart. If our beings revel in the scars and bleed in the unexpected, we are already what we were not.

And we start looking at everything and everyone with new eyes.

And often the direction of our life changes, the people we thought were inseparable to the importance of our lives, now look like milestones - without the love dimming, without the care diminishing, we know we have different directions to take. And we drift.

We do not break off relationships only out of bitterness or regret. Sometimes we also recognise that we have moved on, and moved in different directions. And we know it’s time to part, and we know the hurt we will leave behind. We know explanations might sound lame, and to say “I love you” whilst leaving, is contrarian and often unexplainable.

But our heart knows the truth - it often says that there are bigger issues than love, when our very existence is at stake, when the space we need to find for ourselves needs to be unencumbered, when what we stand for or seek, needs solitude because we’ve already crowded it with personalities and our own personas which require either recognition or elimination.

We do not leave anybody - we are only in search of a new self. And to find a new nook which says -“Stay”.

If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on departures -