Behind the Music
I wrote "If I Never Love Again" in September of 2017. Then I put it down, and it stayed down. Two moves, two states, and somewhere in all that packing and unpacking the poem went into a box and out of my mind entirely. I didn't think about it once. I couldn't have told you it existed.
Then it turned up. Not found, exactly. It surfaced, the way things do when they've decided you're finally ready for them. And it wouldn't leave me alone. I'd set it aside and it would be back the next morning, a line of it running through my head while I was doing something else entirely. It nagged. Then it insisted. Eventually I stopped arguing and sat down with it, and I understood why it had waited.
The version of me who wrote it in 2017 was still standing too close. He was writing about loss while the loss was in the room with him, and the poem knew something he didn't yet. It took the years, and the distance, and probably both of those moves for me to hear what my own words had been trying to tell me.
Here's what they were saying. Love arrives, and love leaves, and both of those are real. But the leaving doesn't repossess what came before. The memories don't get taken back. They settle somewhere deep, in the soul if you believe in one and in the body if you don't, and they stay. They're not a wound you carry. They're warmth you get to keep.
So the question the title asks, whether there's another chance coming, turns out to be the wrong question. I spent a long time worrying about it. What I've landed on is simpler and steadier: I loved. It happened. Nobody can undo that, and no future either grants or withholds its meaning.
I'm lucky to have loved at all. That, my friends, matters far more than whether it comes around again.