I've lived
in other people's minds
without ever meeting myself there.
To one, I was rude.
To another, kind.
A flirt.
Distant.
Too quiet.
Too much.
Perhaps none of them
were wrong.
Perhaps none of them
were right.
I thought I knew the whole.
I had lived every second of it.
But I carried what they couldn't:
the thought before the word,
the fear behind the silence,
the reason I walked away.
Every mistake had a motive.
Every silence had a history.
Every leaving
had an explanation.
No one else
gets the footnotes.
They only get
the sentence.
So perhaps
you never knew all of me.
Perhaps
I never did either.
What happens to me
in a story
where I cannot explain myself?
If I heard it
from the other side,
would I defend her?
Would I forgive her?
Would I even know
she was me?
And if someone told you
your own story
without your footnotes,
would you?