Nobody Left

There was no other person.

There was no terrible night, no thing said

that either of us could point at afterwards.

People keep waiting for me to give them the reason

and there isn't one, and that makes them uncomfortable,

so I've started inventing a small one to be polite.

It went the way a house goes.

Nothing dramatic. Just nobody doing the roof —

Nobody left. (nobody left)

Nobody left. (nobody left)

We just stopped arriving —

two people getting further apart on the same sofa.

Nobody left. (nobody left)

That's what took so long to see.

There was no door. There was just less.

I stopped asking how the meeting went.

You stopped telling me about the funny thing at work.

Neither of those is a crime. They're barely events.

And a hundred of them is a marriage,

or the lack of one,

and nobody sends a warning when you're at ninety.

You can survive a betrayal. People do.

There's something to forgive, at least. Something to work at —

Nobody left. (nobody left)

Nobody left. (nobody left)

Nothing to forgive —

just two decent people letting the small things go for years.

Nobody left. (nobody left)

And you can't reconcile a drift.

There's nothing there to hold.

The last honest conversation we had

was about whether to keep the flat,

and it was calm, and it was practical,

and at the end of it you said "we were good, though,"

and I said "we were," and we both meant it,

and that was somehow the worst part of the entire thing.

Nobody left. (nobody left)

Nobody left. (nobody left)

And if there's anything in it,

it's that love is mostly upkeep, and upkeep is boring,

and boring is where it happens.

Nobody left. (nobody left)

Nobody stayed either.