I Love You

By Daisy Dai

I love you.
Your declaration of adoration,
and I missed the cue.

How telling the first time
you said I love you
was written at the bottom
of a letter on Valentine’s Day,
and I didn’t see it.

You thought I didn’t love you,
and the whole night you were
quiet and distant.

In the morning you stormed off,
and heartbroken I
re-read your letter to find
those three words.

I wonder to this day why you didn’t just say it.

What an indication of the future,
our endless, relentless stream of
miscommunication.

I love you became
more of a way to say
goodbye, what we say when
we hang up a phone call, or as
I left the door to go to work.

The last words we ever said
to each other were
those three words
months after we had broken up
during the end of a phone call.

The last one we ever had.

This time you missed the cue,
thinking it meant I wanted to stay in touch.
Not realizing I said it like we
always did: Goodbye.

Because it hurt too much to stay.
To see you waste your life
swallowed whole by whiskey
knowing I could never save you.