Poetry Break, Fantasy vs Reality

I'm a few days late for National Poetry Month. But poetry endures.

Fantasy

It doesn’t matter now.

It never really mattered anyway.

It was a fantasy.

A ten year fantasy

in which I struggled to be

your

reality

and you steadfastly held us to

fantasy,

always separating your worlds

so they wouldn’t

collide,

always carefully replacing me in my own

little velvet box

and gently closing the deep, quiet lid

when you left

so that you didn’t hear me and

I didn’t intrude in your

daily life,

bleed into your friends,

spill into your family,

erupt unbidden into your thoughts

at work.

And I breathed life incessantly into

my fantasy

that your heart held me as

mine held you,

and convinced myself that I was okay with

fantasy instead of reality,

that because I enjoyed you,

I enjoyed the fantasy.

My reality was fearful

and you were safe. 

CPR for an imaginary world.

Reality

Reality

would have our lives

 converge,

making me

integral to your daily life

and you to mine –

not limited to flurried intersections

of escape from

wiping faces, folding laundry, and

trips to the grocery store when the milk

runs out,

but fastened to them.

Somehow the fantasy has gasped its last

and now

it is nakedly clear

that it never really mattered.

And

that what mattered in the end

is

I learned the difference between

fantasy and reality,

that you can’t force yourself

uninvited

into another’s reality.

I learned to trust myself,

learned that fantasy

- no matter how seductively wonderful -

in the end

is no more than

smoke and mirrors

that disappear

when the lights come on.

- Kara Stewart, 2008