​You​​ left without saying Goodbye.
I waited, hoping you’d return, remembering.
Because the last time we met,
Years ago, 
I was the first to leave, 
And I had remembered. I had waved. 
A special farewell, just for you. 

And all through the night
It kept me awake: 
Why did you not say Goodbye?
Why was it so difficult?
You knew you were leaving.
I didn’t. 

The acknowledgement was casual.
The kind people exchange when 
They pass each other by.

I waited. 
The evening retreated,
The guests flowed in and out,
Until they flowed in no more.

Then it came home to me.
You had never seen me the way I saw you.
The frequency, the wavelength,
All those clichés I’d used 
T o describe us, albeit to myself,
None of it was real.

Looking back, our conversations
So interesting and engrossing, to me,
Seem so fragile, so thin 
Like smoke, 
Rising, spreading, dissipating,
Thin ice, cracking, breaking,
Non existent now. 
I’d read too much between the lines.
Which had been nothing but vacuum.

So ridiculous, such a mockery.
I must have made a fine spectacle.
The support I offered
The sympathetic ear, the shoulder…
A fine spectacle indeed
If all that had meant nothing.

Perhaps I should just laugh
At my own foolishness-
Jumping to conclusions that never existed.
Perhaps I should forget,
Because it had been clearly 
All in my own mind, and 
Perhaps it is time to
Return to my land of silence.