You’re leaving on a jet plane
tomorrow, and if our life together
was like a movie,
it’d be set in the 1920s,
the color sucked out from
the landscape and replaced
with dull grays and deep blacks.
You’d be sharply dressed in a suit jacket
and suspenders, carrying a simple
suitcase.
My mascara would be smeared across
my flushed cheeks,
and the engines of the plane
would roar to life behind you.
I will clutch you and hold
you, and we will cry.

It couldn’t have happened
any other way.