An Incomplete Love Story
They met one summer’s end. He was in town
for not too long and needed to get back
to his own country. Meanwhile, he hung out
with family. His sister lived in that
small town, and he was staying at her house.
He drove around a Riviera car,
his in-law’s, who was an American.
To fill his time, he’d cross the street to see
the pretty girl who was its night cashier.
He’d caught her eye and he could tell that she
was into him like he was into her!
They’d flirted for a week when finally,
he asked her out. She happily said yes.
Romance was blossoming at rapid speed.
The girl was seventeen and still in school.
She didn’t know his language, but he knew
a bit of English though it mattered not;
they spoke to one another with their eyes!
A soul connection like no other that
he’d felt before in all his nineteen years
developed in that week when first they met.
He knew she loved him though they never spoke
those “three short words.” He read it in the way
she touched his face and gazed into his soul.
If only she were finished with her school,
perhaps she’d leave with him, for he could not
stay longer in America. The time
for him to leave came quickly. Both agreed
to write each other, and they spoke by phone.
It wasn’t like today with instant texts.
The girl would fairly dance with happiness
to get his cards and letters in the mail.
They dreamed apart the dream of being with
their other half so many miles away.
The girl took off for college in a year.
The young man tried to make a better life
in hopes that she might join him one sweet day.
But other plans got in the way, and he
quite foolishly lost contact with the girl.
She wrote to him, but he’d left home to train
for his new job. The girl felt he’d moved on. . .
The next year passed. The girl found a new man.
Her soul mate he was not, yet she was young
and foolish like the boy who’d failed to write
and answer her last letters that she’d sent.
He had his job. He called her home phone, but
she didn’t live there any more. He got
the number she was using, which was new.
With nervousness, he called this number which
her mom had given him. He’d not been told
the circumstances and how she’d moved on.
She took his phone call, asking “Who is this?”
And when he said his name, there was a pause. . .
She told him she was married, and a child
was on the way. They chatted for a while,
but he could never realize the pain
the girl was feeling, knowing she could not
be with him ever! To this very day,
he does not know he stays inside her mind;
that when she writes romance, she writes of him
and unrequited love, not knowing that
he too still thinks of her and always will.
Now lost to one another, each subsists
on memories of sweet unblemished bliss.
July 23, 2018 Written in blank verse, all iambic pentameter lines.
For Faraz Ajmal's "An Incomplete Love Story" Poetry Contest
|