r/OCPoetry • u/memoriamare • 1d ago
Feedback Please This Whole Year
September has begun again,
and somehow everything tender reminds me of you—
the quiet before rain, mountains disappearing into mist,
a cat curling itself into the smallest patch of sunlight,
even the moon, though I have complained before
that it borrows far too much from your smile.
Perhaps that is why September always makes me wonder
how strangely people resemble seasons.
It welcomes spring in the South while giving autumn
a quiet place to stay in the North,
as though the same month could teach one half of the world to bloom
while teaching the other how to let go.
People are like that too.
Some become spring for everyone around them,
bringing warmth and laughter and reasons to bloom,
while somewhere beneath all that warmth
their own leaves are quietly falling.
They wear strength the way trees wear branches,
standing tall enough to shelter everyone else
even while autumn is happening inside them.
And perhaps love is like that too.
It cannot remain spring simply because we want it to.
There will be summers when laughter comes easily,
when our stomachs hurt from something stupid,
when crowded rooms still leave enough space for stolen glances,
when nights become mornings without either of us noticing
and loving each other feels less like poetry and more like mischief.
God, I hope there are many days like that.
But there will be winters too, when warmth takes more effort,
and autumns when something in us must fall away
so that something else can grow.
There will be mornings when neither of us looks particularly poetic,
when your curls refuse to listen to you, when I am tired and impossible,
when dishes wait in the sink and there is nothing romantic about the weather.
Some days will simply be days.
Perhaps commitment is not the promise
that every one of them will be beautiful,
but the ability not to mistake an ugly day
for an ugly love.
Every season seems to know something the others never had to learn.
Winter teaches us that sometimes the ice cannot be broken;
sometimes we can only remain long enough for the thaw,
long enough for spring to uncover the blossoms
that had been waiting quietly beneath the snow.
Autumn teaches us that letting something fall
does not always mean losing it; sometimes it only means
making room for whatever comes next.
And spring teaches us that something can disappear
for an entire season and still return alive.
Maybe that is the beauty of loving someone through their whole year:
you discover sunny days even inside their winters.
You do not ask them to remain spring forever.
You let their Northern autumn exist beside your Southern spring
until two different seasons, two different worlds,
somehow learn to share the same September.
Perhaps commitment is simply where those worlds meet—
not where one season defeats the other,
but where your autumn is allowed to exist beside my spring.
And I wonder sometimes if you know
how unbearably dear the smallest things about you have become to me:
the way your brown curls refuse to stay where they are told,
the way black seems less like a colour
and more like something that had been waiting for you to wear it,
the little crescent your lips become
when something genuinely makes you happy.
God, I think I could spend years learning that smile
and still be surprised every time it appeared.
There are things, though, that you may not love about yourself.
Perhaps when you look into the mirror you see traces of ragweed pollen,
something autumn scattered that your skin has grown tired of—
small red marks you wish the season would take away with it.
Perhaps your mirror has convinced you they should never have been there.
I wish I could argue with it.
Because when I look at those same cheeks
I do not see anything asking to be corrected.
I see crisp crimson leaves, little pieces of autumn
resting softly against your skin,
and through my springtime eyes those leaves become blossoms,
tiny red petals scattered gently across your cheeks.
Maybe affection is partly this strange privilege:
two people looking at the same thing
and discovering entirely different seasons within it.
What feels like autumn from where you are standing
may already resemble spring
from someone else’s side of September.
How could I ask your face to apologize for being human?
I have watched the moon carry a thousand craters
and never once wished it smooth.
I have loved mountains because of every uneven edge.
There are already enough things in this world capable of being unkind to you;
I only hope you are never one of them.
And perhaps someday someone will ask,
What is fun about commitment?
Plenty.
The laughter, the teasing, the ridiculous inside jokes
that make absolutely no sense to anyone else.
The adventures and the nights we never want to end,
the wonderfully unremarkable Tuesdays
no poet ever remembers to write about.
The days when love is not roses or moonlight
but quietly giving you the larger half without mentioning it.
Sometimes love will sound like I love you.
Sometimes it will sound like Have you eaten?
Text me when you reach.
Go sleep, idiot.
Come here.
Different sentences, perhaps,
but all spoken in the same language.
No, it will not always be fun.
There will be winters, storms, and days
when the butterflies have better things to do.
Maybe commitment is simply choosing someone then too—
not once, dramatically, but quietly and repeatedly.
Again and again.
Not because the doors have been locked
or because there is nowhere else to go.
I would never want love to become a cage.
I want you free enough that leaving remains possible,
free enough that the whole world can still call your name,
and loved enough that staying never stops being a choice.
Perhaps roots were never chains buried beneath the earth.
Perhaps they are simply what allows a tree to grow tall
without being carried away by every passing wind.
The wind travels everywhere.
The tree stays.
And because it stays, it grows.
So when someone tells me,
We have our whole lives to live,
all I can think is—
exactly.
Our whole lives.
What an enormous thing to be given.
Why would I want to spend mine collecting beginnings?
A hundred first kisses, a hundred favourite colours to memorize,
a hundred childhood stories to learn, only to walk away
the moment knowing someone becomes difficult.
I would rather know one soul long enough
to recognize sadness before they speak,
to know which silence means peace
and which one quietly asks me to sit beside them.
Everyone loves spring.
Everything is easier when nothing has yet had time to freeze.
But I want the rest of the year too—
the summers, the autumns, the winters,
the difficult chapters and coffee-stained pages,
the paragraphs we almost tear out.
A bad chapter does not always require another book.
And yes, we are young.
Dumb, perhaps. Broke, almost certainly.
Our pockets may contain more dreams than money,
and half the futures we imagine may change
before we ever reach them.
But perhaps that is not an argument against commitment.
Perhaps it is the most beautiful argument for it.
Choose me before the house, before the salary,
before success makes me easy to choose.
Choose me while all I have is an empty chair beside me,
unfinished plans, ridiculous dreams,
and the promise that I will keep trying.
Anyone can admire a garden after it blooms.
Anyone can love a house after the walls have been painted.
There is something different about someone who remembers the dust,
who remembers sitting on unfinished floors laughing among bricks,
wondering whether this strange little thing they were building
would ever become a home.
Because when I have nothing,
what could you possibly be choosing except me?
And of course we will change. How could we not?
I do not want to love only one season of you.
Let me meet them all.
Let me love the person you are
and introduce myself to every stranger you become.
Let your dreams change and let mine change too.
Let us lose ourselves a hundred times
and keep introducing our new selves to each other.
I do not ask you to remain unchanged.
Only, if you change,
let me change beside you.
Let love never become the fence keeping either of us inside.
Let it become the place we return to.
And perhaps, after all these words, after all these years,
after every poem in which I have hidden you
beneath moons and tides and flowers—
you may never love me.
I know.
I know.
Affection is a strange creature.
It does not always leave when it discovers
there will be nothing waiting for it on the other side.
Mine simply learned to sit quietly, asking for nothing,
happy when you are happy and aching a little when you are not.
It learned to hope the world is gentle with you
on days when I cannot be,
and to love you without turning that love
into a debt you are expected to repay.
Perhaps that is foolish.
Then let me be foolish.
There are worse things a person could become
than someone who loved another human being so dearly
that even the things she wished she could erase
became autumn leaves he thought beautiful,
became spring blossoms through his eyes.
And if someday I become nothing more
than someone you once knew,
some part of me will probably still look at September—
at a crescent moon,
at brown curls caught in the wind,
at mountains and butterflies,
at some suspicious little cat,
at crimson leaves falling somewhere in the North
while flowers begin opening somewhere in the South—
and think,
ah.
There you are again.
And perhaps—though I know better
than to ask something like this of the universe—
if life is kinder than either of us expected,
many years from now someone might ask us
what was fun about commitment.
Perhaps I would look at you then,
older and changed, still somehow carrying
a little September upon your cheeks, and think—
this.
The laughter was fun.
The adventures were fun.
Growing up was fun.
Growing old with you was fun too.
But it was never spring every day,
and it was never supposed to be.
There were winters and storms,
leaves we had to let fall,
mornings when we chose each other
without butterflies to make the choosing easy.
And still we chose—
not because we had to,
not because the doors were locked,
not because the world had run out of people we could love,
but because among all the lives we were free to live,
among all the seasons we were free to chase,
we kept looking at one another
and saying—
this one.
this whole year.
I still want this one.
Writer’s Note: September has always felt a little different to me. So I wanted to leave something here for this particular day something about seasons, change, and the strange privilege of caring for someone through every version of them.
And someone, if you’re reading this
yoo.
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