Who cares

She told me no one cared about the two of us

Boring, she said. The struggles, the compromises.

how we learned so very painfully to listen

The way laughter slowly replaced anger

and the present outlived our pasts

No, she told me. No one wants to hear it.

I pointed to the words of another traveller

a woman whose name still rings silver

through halls so sacred. at least to someone

She gets it, I countered. A shrug. Dismissed.

But I insist: I will record how you lay in the floor

to charm me out of bitterness, my curses melting

into fragile hope. How you gave me a year

and how it grew like a many-trunked banyan tree

each trunk another year, another life explored.

Now, you are ash and memory. Like the earth

beneath that banyan tree. So I send these

words into the void, where hope still wars

with anger and despair, and I do not care

about those others, those she said will not care.