Training Wheels

The delicate dance of romanticizing the finite

To look her in the eye again with the all too familiar tunnel vision

Ignoring the countdown above her brow

To carry on full speed ahead past dead end signs

To grapple with the beauty in what ultimately maims me.

I know too well how it ends to plea naivety

My patchwork safety blanket only recognizable in essence

I’m not as clean as I used to be though try as I may

Things don’t get easier so much as I grow around them.

But —

There lives a silver lining

Comfort food in the event of a failure

Beautifully inevitable

A glass half full even after I spill her

And god knows I will

An irreplicable purity as a bed never lay in.

There we breed simplicity.

A tenderness of first-times and unspoken mutuality

The pursuit of happiness

A rest stop unforgotten on the journey there

In ultimately the best of ways

And if I’m being honest,

I didn’t know I missed her

Though she may not have always been this beautiful

This welcoming

This bittersweet

I can listen to Leith Ross again without being sick

Or fear of being outgrown

Even in the fluidity of transience

The training wheel pedal straight for the sun

How could I have ever hated her for this gift?

When it hurts it is much harder to be so grateful

Though I know cracks in the rose coloured glass ought to go ignored

I catch myself trip each time

Trust-fall into credulity like a safety net

Without so much as looking behind me

I never learn.

There is joy in she who reintroduces bliss

Once despised

Joy in that she is loved even when she is unkind

But is she ever unkind.

The delicate dance of romanticizing the finite

For which I’m cursed with two left feet

What is coming better be worth the trouble I can’t help but cause me