it's four in the morning
more than three years after i left you
and i'm thinking about you
and how you cried and walked home in the snow

what is there to say
that i haven't already said?

i was afraid of you
i was afraid of who i became
around you
i use the past tense
but god knows that's wishful thinking
when you still show up in nightmares
and i flinch if i see you on the street

maybe the worst is
what you did wasn't even illegal
or wrong, technically,
if you ask the right people

it's just that i was talking
to jake and he doesn't know the
story and he said 16 is legal
and i said that doesn't make it okay
and we dropped the subject there but
i spent the rest of the night thinking about you

i was 17 when you were 23
you took advantage of my sadness
and vulnerability
and youth but you
never really broke the law and
jake is one of my best friends but he's
also a police academy graduate and he
thinks in black and white and
this poem isn't really about you, or jake,
it's about me

and the knowledge that ours is a story
i can never tell without the fear that
i'll lose another person i love
because if they don't see anything wrong with
what you did to me then it probably is my fault
in the end and i should have known better and i
should have tried harder and i should have been
older and stronger and smarter and louder and

i can't do this i can't do this i can't
do this i can't do this i can't do this i
can't do this i can't do this i can't fucking do this