Once it was May,
and flowers bloomed in sidewalk cracks,
robins flitted through the not-quite-summer air and
I lay in bed with the windows open and wrote poems as light as butterfly wings.
I thought I had everything figured out.
Last year was full of despair, of uncertainty
but I thought sadness was over now,
crumpled at the bottom of a trash can, never to resurface.
I'd found you, my confidante, my partner in crime,
and we'd walked out of a deep, dark tunnel hand in hand
into a gorgeous, blooming meadow
where the beaming sun and soft birdsong
lulled us into thinking that it could last forever,
deluded us with lush monotony, sacred peacefulness,
not-quite-silent, but quiet enough.
It was great while it lasted, wasn't it?
Us by the pond, feet splashing in the cool, murky water,
thinking we could do anything.
(Could we?
Would we?)
I remember, sometime in the wildfire of that too-perfect month,
staring at my reflection in a cracked mirror, who knows how old
browned around the edges and covering my face in a yellow sheen
eyes rimmed with mascara,
lips shimmering softly, ready for a performance
and I barely recognized myself,
but I didn't want to.
Who said I had to be the person I'd been for the first 12 years of my life?
It was May now,
and I was free.

But May went away, as all Mays do,
spring morphed into summer,
and summer decayed into autumn,
which finally surrendered to winter,
painfully slow, softly gradient.
Staring around my room,
I see the ghost of the girl I once was,
the girl who had hardly anything to tell her therapist
the girl who never doubted your love
the girl who, eight months ago, finally thought she'd walked out of a deep, dark tunnel
she was only just stepping in.
I see her now,
within little doodles in the margins of my notebooks,
within the clothes I once thrifted,
within my own face.
She's not here now, but she isn't gone,
and she will be coming back.

Once it was May,
now it is not.
But one day,
it will be May again.