The Weight of You – A Poem

I bought you a t-shirt.

When I saw it,

I thought of you,

but I will not be the one

to give it to you.

You have not spoken to me

in twenty-seven years,

over half my life.

I don’t know why I thought of you,

only that you bloomed in my mind

and I pressed buy now

before I could think about

the reasons behind the action.

When she asked me if I

wanted you to know,

I told her yes, then no.

I knew that if you knew

that I was the one

to buy you the shirt,

you would not wear it,

just like you have not spoken to me

in so long.

The thing that has been most

on my mind is that you

have become someone

that I don’t even know.

You are not my brother anymore,

not my twin or the

other half of me in the mirror.

Before we could speak words,

we spoke our own language

and for a years,

we shared a link that I thought

would never be severed.

Yet, as we grew older,

we spent all of our time

trying to be individuals,

tired of being endlessly compared

to each other, never separate.

Well, now you have become

a stranger to me and I’ve realized

that we finally have what we wanted

so long ago.

Though my heart grieves

for what it has lost in you,

I no longer want to carry this

weight, or the memory of you, within me.

As I kneel at the rivers edge,

I put my hands in the water,

letting the weight of

you swim free.