Ruffled Feathers

If regret is a song,

then let me answer it once,

low and without feathers ruffled:

I do not regret you.

Even now.

Even as your morning song

tries to unwrite our mornings.


You think your sorrow is a river—

it is a mirror.

You polish it each dawn

to see yourself as someone who once loved

and lost the right to.

But love was never a right.

It was a branch we both landed on.


That row?

It was not the fall.

It was your pride refusing the landing.


So sing your elegy to the empty field.

I have already flown

not away from you,

but past the story you need me to live inside.


You call it regret.

I call it your ego

wearing mourning clothes

because it could not win a fight

that never needed winning.


I will not match you grief for grief.

Instead, I will eat the same red berry

under the same sun

and remember us whole—

not because I am blind,

but because I am not afraid

of the small, broken parts.


Your regret is yours to carry.

Mine would be a lie.

And lying to make you comfortable

is the one thing

I never learned to sing.

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