#once again not an aro poem per se but relevant to many aros i think

[arotechno]

eulogy for a friend (reprise)

(companion piece to "eulogy for a friend")

I’m starting to think I had it wrong, before.

Maybe this November—squinting at each other in the dim light of the bar—was the beginning of something new, like rewriting our future from scratch. Like putting pen to paper at the start of a brand new chapter. Like an acknowledgment of our shared grief, of the realization that maybe we’re both bleeding, and maybe it was still worth it.

Someday soon, I’ll see you again, locking eyes across the table while you tell a joke only I’d ever understand. Someday soon, I’ll send you a Christmas card, and you’ll tell your dad I said hello. Someday, you’ll get engaged—and maybe I’ll have met the man once or twice, after all, and I won’t be the first or the fifth or even the tenth person that you tell, but that will be just fine. Someday, we’ll run into each other at some other reunion, ten, twenty years down the line, and you’ll tell me all about the moments I’ve missed in the interim years, and when you disappear into the throng again, I won’t remember to feel sad. And someday, years and years from now, when one of us is dead or dying, maybe I will have been right, before, and it won’t matter after all. But probably not. Probably not.

Someday, maybe we’ll quietly go our separate ways for good, like ships passing in the night. But today, I will tell you that I love you, I love you, I love you, and it isn’t enough, not anymore—that maybe we really are two falling stars, headed in opposite trajectories across the unforgiving universe.

But there is a certainty buried in that grief: we will always share the same sky.

Maybe someday it won’t matter. Maybe it really never did. And maybe I was right, and there was never a point, and we were only ever satellites, running on borrowed light. Maybe I really will forget about you, and all of this. But probably not. No, probably not.