Page 116 of I'm Gonna Get You Back
If love means chasing
fading light, I’ll run, chest burning
into your night
I run my fingertips across the words, my eyes filling and my heart squeezing with every single one. A shocked laugh caught in my throat at the total impossibility of this.
He wrote me a poem.
Thispoem.
The exact same one I have tattooed on my skin.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWOCLARATHEN
WHEN I COULDN’T BRINGmyself to pick up the nextGlass Swordsbook after graduation, I started reading poetry. A lot of books that Reid had recommended. He loved short-form poems—haikus and brief sonnets. Fast and powerful, like the way he ran. The more I read, the more I sought out. I started following accounts online that I liked, one in particular that Reid would’ve loved called Haiku for You. The first post stopped me in my tracks in part because of the self-deprecating caption (when you make a haiku account but the poem doesn’t want to cooperate):
If love means chasing
fading light, I’ll run, chest burning
into your night
I liked that it wasn’t a perfect haiku. Something about that made sense. An acknowledgment that sometimes the rules work against you.I tried to scroll through the profile, but it was the first and only post on it so far.
I read the poem over and over. Those few sparse words reminded me of the darkness that had consumed my life, my home, my future. The black hole that I tried to hide from everyone.
Until Reid.
He was too shy to ever share his poetry with me, but I wished I could send this one to him. Tell him it reminded me of him and the way he ran toward me, instead of away from me. Tell him that it felt like the love between us—active and alive—that I could never say in words. That I never let him speak aloud.
But I knew he didn’t want to hear from me, so I never did.
Over the following months, as I sank deeper and deeper, I held on to the memory of Reid telling me that a setback wouldn’t stop me, held on to the poem, reading it day after day. Grateful to whoever wrote it for giving me hope that there was something on the other side of this pain.
I checked the profile occasionally. They posted other poems. Full of heartbreak and longing. Somehow reflecting everything I was feeling that summer, too.
But the first was my favorite.
Eventually, I knew that I wanted those beautiful words on me forever. As a reminder of what I finally knew to be true. Even if we never spoke again, Reid would always matter to me.
He cracked something open in me I never wanted to close again.
When I told Mitchell about getting the tattoo, his face screwed up in concern. “Are you sure about this? This is some random poem off the internet, I feel like you should know who wrote it…”
I shook my head. “I don’t need to know.”
For whatever reason, the poem felt like it belonged to me. I wanted to keep it that way.
The buzz of Aunt Lisette’s needle kicked on and became background noise as it lanced and vibrated against my skin. Every stroke an agonizing bolt.
Throughout the whole process, slow tears slipped down my nose. But not because of the physical pain. Because for the first time, it felt as though I was claiming a different path for myself. A promise to let love in.
Even in darkness, to never stop chasing light.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREEREIDNOW
THE LEGACY BANQUET
