The Last Time I’ll Write About You by Dawn Lanuza

Have you ever felt that someone is just stuck in your mind long after their last steps have taken them walking out of your life?

Have you struggled with letting go of something that may have been toxic, that may have been a complete and TOTAL mess? I mean, you’re better off now. Right?

Have you found yourself reminiscing over all the what-ifs and what-could-have-beens? Are you stuck there? Or have you convinced yourself that you’re no LONGER there?

The Last Time I’ll Write About You resonated with me for that reason as I happen to know what all that felt like.

Love can be a wonderful experience, an emotional connection that takes us to the highest mountains and fills our heart and lungs with the elixir of life.

And yet, love can also be a very complicated thing. Another entire being that can dictate how we view the world, how we interact with it.

Breakups can be so messy because of this. It leaves us vulnerable. Wanting to close in again. And if you’re the one with the heart broken, anything can remind us of that person. Anything.

Dawn Lanuza pens a series of poems that speak to personal experience of such things. While a little rudimentary in style compared to other poets I’ve been reading lately, I think it’s still a collection worth browsing through.

For some people (including me), writing is cathartic. It’s like we have permission to feel the things we do once we pen it all down from our very cramped hearts onto paper (or a screen). And once it’s out there, it hopefully frees up some space inside the 4 chambers of our hearts to start healing.

For some other people, it’s cathartic to know that someone else understands what and how we feel. That we’re not alone in our feelings. That it is okay to be feeling this way. We’re not broken and weak. We’re just human.

This book reminded me of these things. That it’s okay to find it hard to let go sometimes. That it’s not just me who was dumb enough to hold onto something that was never meant to be.

Maybe it can do the same for you.

What resonated the most with me were these 2 poems that I’ll share with you.

1) sometimes the world around us may be reminders of that person in our life – and that’s okay

THE WORLD IS OUR SOUVENIR

The world remembers
What we try to forget
It’s in the embers
Of the things we left

It’s in the concrete,
The streets we used to tread
In the halls we used to meet
When we had hours to spend

It’s in the book you carried home
In this umbrella we shared
It’s in the stars you wished on
In your skin, your palms,
Your fingers: playing with my hair

It’s in your unmade bed
The wrinkle, the weight
It’s in the distance to the door I traveled
In the silence, partings unsaid.

2) hope that we can love again – and love again BETTER

EPILOGUE

Despite everything
I still thank the universe
For blessing me with you
As my first

If I could love you this much
For this long
– And on my first try –
Then surely,

I could love someone else more
Far better
Far longer.

---

I hope this finds you well in a moment where you may need the encouragement, the hope, that love can come again. Maybe even in a better form. It took me years to get out of this slump, and years where I denied the fact that it still held my heart captive in some ways.

But the freeing feeling of crying over that last poem showed me that maybe those last dredges are gone, and in the meantime, I have learned a lot more about myself through it all.

So whether you needed this encouragement or not, I ask of you today: what is love? And does it have a place in your future?