You were an Old Fashioned kind of love,
amber and incandescent, dangerous enough
to make restraint feel almost obsolete,
all bourbon heat beneath deceptive sweet.

A little sugar softened what the bitters knew,
a curl of orange brightened every shade of you.
I tasted warmth and mistook it for grace,
never knowing how long you would remain in taste.

I fell too fast.

Not slowly, not with care,
but like bourbon catching fire in air.
One moment steady, guarded, whole,
the next you were everywhere inside my soul.

You made intoxication feel like peace,
made all my careful inhibitions cease.
I drank you in before I understood
that something could be ruinous
and still taste good.

And then you were gone.

No gentle fading.
No final pour.
Just the glass ripped suddenly from my hand
while I was still reaching for more.

That was the cruelty of it.

I had not finished loving you.

There was still warmth in the glass,
still sweetness at the bottom,
still futures suspended in amber
I had not yet learned were impossible.

Endings do not always wait
for the heart to consent.

Sometimes they arrive without ceremony,
and leave the living
to negotiate with what remains.

So now I carry you like whiskey heat,
something vanished from the tongue
but lingering underneath.

A ghost of citrus.
Bitters on the breath.
Residual warmth
that somehow survived its death.

Time has diluted some of the pain,
but dilution is not erasure all the same.
One song, one street, one familiar light,
and suddenly I am drinking from that night.

The glass fills again.

The burn returns.

Memory has a merciless way
of resurrecting what the body once learned.

Maybe that is what disastrous love becomes:

a distillation.

The sweetness evaporates first.
What remains is concentrated ache,
the strongest notes preserved
after everything else has burned away.

And I know better now.

I know sugar can disguise severity.
I know warmth can imitate security.
I know the beautiful burn can still destroy
the very thing it once made feel like joy.

But if someone asked me what you were,
I would still answer without hesitation:

strong,
sweet,
bitter,
brief.

A beautiful intoxication
with a brutal finish.

The kind of love
you swallow once,

feel burning all the way down,

and spend the rest of your life
tasting
in the empty glass.