On Hope

I don’t remember the day I met you,
and I’m not exactly sure who saw whom, but I think it was me
who saw you across the room.
And then that was it,
I took you home.
I reckoned you could teach me everything.

Not that I should want to learn everything,
and especially not from someone like you,
but your honesty provided a home
for now, for me,
and, if I’m to be completely honest about it,
within, your apathy was a welcomed single room.

How I liked that room!
In it you questioned everything.
What mattered, if any of it?
Inquiring you,
and imitating me.
Together we sought out a new home.

And what a beautiful home, our home.
One hundred and eighteen white walls made up our room.
You wrote your history on all of them and in it I saw myself, me,
recognized every detail. Everything.
That was the day I realised I may not be imitating you
at all. But that’s not good, is it?

Have I said it?
That you remind me of someone from back home?
I think that was the intrigue about you:
you could teach me, in this room,
everything
about him and, by extension, about me.

I used to say he wasn’t like me,
but that’s not the case, is it?
You enlightened me about everything.
It takes guts to admit you know nothing about your heart or your home.
More so to admit that there’s a lack of both. In a single room
you told me that there was for you. Fearless you.

You walked into the room and I followed you.
Revisiting your home, I saw the faults in the one that had belonged to me,
and you made me see it: If I forgive, we can change everything.