A Change

You dare stand there
with a depreciating word perched behind your teeth
and a superiority-complex
poking from your eyelids
to tell me, as you would a small child,
that I’ve “changed”.
The last time you looked upon my face,
it stared up at you with open-fielded,
once-in-a-lifetime adoration
that felt as universal as gravity,
as everlasting as any sixteen-year-old’s imagination.
Now, you fail to read devotion in my laugh lines,
every new freckle has a story you weren’t there for
and you cannot find that once-sweet reverence
spelled out across each of my features.

Is this the change you mean?
Do you speak of the falling of my lips from my face
the night I waited until dawn
for you to come?
Or you you wish to remind me
of the lines eroded into my cheeks
from the salt water that flowed down my skin
to cleanse myself of every trace of you?

I have lived a life without you,
had gargantuan, spellbinding moments
where you weren’t even a note on the wind,
where your existence seemed as irrelevant
as any of the rest of us.
The face you once memorized
was the face of a person who could never fathom
the possibility of your existence
being anything other than essential to my own,
not this version of hard bone and soft skin
that you see before you now,
a version that has moved mountains and climbed skies
and swam in rivers and slept beneath stars
a thousand times over before finally forgetting you.

I’ve changed, so completely and deliciously,
like the phases of the moon
and the turning of seasons
I’ve changed and changed and changed again,
shedding each old layer of myself like skin
and with it, the memories of you
once gilded beside my heart,
now rusted and rinsed clean.
I’ve changed,
and I embrace every inch of it,
every note, every flavour,
because I’m here and now,
still me, but more.