"A Letter to My Love"

A Letter to My Love

-A Found Poem

I miss you.

You mean so much to me.

Going through this part of life,

With you not there,

Is going to be hard.

I’ll stumble where you held me up.

I’ll go on, but slower than if you were here.

You’re a part of who I am.

And you won’t be there.

But you will later,

And when you’re there again,

I’ll be better…

You won’t be gone.

-Melissa

            How often do we tell loved ones that we'll miss them? If we were given the opportunity to explain what that means, what would we say? Missing someone is really a strange concept. I was talking to a friend about it, and what they said seemed to explain it well. For the first time, I felt like I knew what it really meant- what it could mean... what it should mean- to miss someone. It's more than simply missing them. It's missing their words, their actions, their jokes, their ideas... it's missing that place in your heart that their presence once filled. It's missing their specific way of touching your life, whatever that way may be. In some way, they added to your life, and it’s missing that addition.
            And, especially with people very close to us, life does get harder when they leave. Challenges seem even harder to overcome, because they aren't there cheering you on, giving advice, or lending a hand to help. Sometimes it even seems hard to feel like yourself because... part of who you are is reacting to who they are! And suddenly they aren't there... and you don't quite know what to do.
            The whole idea is sort of beautiful to me. We have the ability to interact with one another in a way that... one day, maybe we will be missed. Our absence will be felt. Not that we want loved ones to experience that feeling of loss, but to be missed? To be missed means that your life has touched another's... and that's powerful…

            Our poetry assignment this week was to write a poem of our choice from the forms we were given last year, (in that beginner's poetry class that I mentioned before.) This conversation with my friend was fresh in my mind, so I asked if I could use it to write a Found Poem. (Real quick: a Found poem is a poem written from someone else's words. You don't change the order of their words but you are allowed to change the tenses of words (Like the word "go" can be changed to "going" or "gone") and you may add two words of your own. You can also ditch as many of their words as you wish! But, as previously stated, you can't change the order of their words at all. So, what you write from is what you've got to work with. It's really fun! And it takes forever. It’s also probably my favorite kind of poem to write! And now you know.) My friend said I could use what they had said, so… I started. As I wrote, it hit me that I could do more with this than simply write a poem about the concept of missing someone. I could give it a story. I still didn't have a title, and I realized that for a story, all I had to do was provide a title that told one. I named it, "A Letter to My Love", and decided that people could imagine for themselves who the two were, why they were separated, and all the rest of the twists and turns that gives any good love story an interesting effect.

            I hope you enjoyed this poem, and that somewhere inside you a little story was unfolding… or that it reminded you of someone special in your own life.  If the latter is the case, then… there’s nothing wrong with sitting quietly to let the memories take reality’s place for a moment…

Thanks for reading…