I waved goodbye to the moon last night
but I was really waving goodbye
to you.
Or the you that you were
Before
Before what, exactly?
I am not sure.
Certainly before you turned 16
when the treble in your voice turned bass
But not before grade seven
when your weeds of legs sprouted up
so that your face
glistened
as it touched the Sun.
Perhaps it was just before
age 13
that momentous birthday
when the unspoken threshold is finally crossed:
youth becomes adolescence
child becomes teen
innocence becomes curiosity
becomes experimentation
becomes rebellion
becomes regret
Becomes
of us all
What is the ‘before’
you may ask?
I am not sure.
The only before that matters anymore
is the one that precedes
your death.
I am the lost time traveler
stuck in a never-ending loop
reliving every precious moment with you
Before
We never got to say goodbye, though,
did we?
The sand in your hourglass
had already run out
Sitting in a
motionless
mound, at the bottom
of tinted glass.
No
we never did get to say goodbye,
did we?
So now every night,
I sit by the bay window
in your favorite, leather chair,
drinking tears and warm, honey tea
while your college sweatshirt hugs me.
And as I gaze
through misty lens
towards the watching sky,
I see your perfect, little face
smiling down at me,
and so I wave
goodbye
to the moon.
Nicole Orejuela (she/her/hers) is a twenty-year-old undergraduate junior from Brookfield, Wisconsin, studying psychology at Northwestern University. An ardent writer since elementary school, Nicole won her first writing contest in the 4th-grade for her essay on the Peel Mansion Foundation. Since this early accolade, Nicole’s love for writing and storytelling has only grown as she’s progressed in her academic career, and her poem If I Were a Boy has recently been published in the Alcott Youth Magazine. When she’s not drinking too much coffee at a local café or reading a new psychological thriller novel, Nicole enjoys creating new literary pieces in the form of short stories and poetry and hopes to one day publish a book.