The Promise
Image Courtesy of Adobe Stock
By Alexandra Berrick
Editor’s Note: Poems used to be often included in the Quill section in the past, and I am more than excited to start bringing them back with this wonderful piece by Alexandra! If you have any poems you would like to submit to the Quill section, please reach out to me at mcguiretb@cua.edu.
I thought you cared as much as I did.
What a terrible thing—
differing expectations,
one accepting hesitations,
another excepting condemnations.
That’s the funny thing
about trust; you never know
if one was
until it wasn’t.
Rinse, delete,
let the cycle complete.
Let the cycle repeat,
let it deplete the stores of love
you hold in your heart.
Don’t start,
don’t go too fast,
the last thing you want
is a withered, once-one heart.
I thought you cared as much as I did.
I didn’t need to win,
I just needed you to listen,
to tell me
we were okay.
That the person I thought to be
my lifelong bestie
was not dumping me
that day.
But oh, it wasn’t so.
Hearts will break,
I’m scared to say
no one too strong,
no citizen trained,
no soldier, nor saint
can escape the indelible fate
of incompetence, evil,
resistance, insistence in
a share of what would have been
a work of art, a masterpiece,
but is just a piece
of my wounded soul.
I thought you cared as much as I did.
The friendships I’ve lost
that I’ve made along the way.
For some I’m grate-
ful for its finish. Others,
confused, refuse
to face the sad truth:
They would never care as much as I did.
Now I lie awake,
ashamed, sanity in reins,
impulses unchained,
anger unrestrained,
trying to make sense of
the promise I used to make.
The promise to myself
I had made:
No matter how many pains
of love I suffer from,
never let my heart become
so jaded as to break
completely, collapse
totally, know nothing if not
the ones we love
are the ones
who tend to kill us.
They left nothing but
the remnants of
a girl who used to love
in their wake.
I prayed that things
would stay the same,
but it wasn’t so.
Not anymore, anyway.
The prophecy foretold
and myself to blame,
may my cautionary tale
make me finally change.
And may the promise
to which I’d cleave
at long last
rest in peace.
