love and loss

Consider Yourself Lucky

Angel BoucherLeave a comment

I did you a favor, though perhaps
you will need distance to understand it.
Some things are only recognized as rare
after someone careless has lost their chance to hold them.

I gave you access to a version of me
I had learned to protect with extraordinary care.
Not because I was impossible to reach,
but because I understood what access could cost.

I did not choose you from loneliness.
I had already built a life before you arrived.
You were invited into something standing,
and somehow I still made room.

I learned the architecture of your silences,
the weather hiding behind your words.
I noticed what exhausted you, what frightened you,
what you tried hardest not to reveal.

There is intimacy in being known like that.

Not attraction.
Not convenience.
Not the temporary thrill of being wanted.
The rarer kind: being understood without performance.

I saw what was difficult about you.

I noticed the contradictions,
the arrogance behind certain defenses,
the distance between who you said you were
and who your choices sometimes revealed.

And somehow, I still believed
the better parts deserved consideration.

Perhaps that was generous of me.

I gave you the benefit of doubts
you had done very little to earn.
I translated inconsistency into complexity,
hesitation into fear, distance into circumstance.

You may call that love.

I occasionally call it poor judgment.

Still, what I offered was real.

I gave you softness without demanding perfection,
loyalty without requiring a performance.
I wanted to understand you, not redesign you,
and people spend lifetimes looking for that.

You happened upon it.

That distinction matters.

You did not create my capacity for tenderness.
You did not teach me depth or devotion.
Those things belonged to me long before you.
You were simply fortunate enough to receive them.

For a while.

Maybe you thought that kind of love was ordinary.
Maybe you assumed someone else would come along
and notice the details, interpret the silences,
and make the complicated parts feel worth knowing.

Perhaps they will.

But someday, when something feels slightly absent,
when a question goes unasked
or a part of you goes unseen,
maybe you will finally understand.

There was a time I thought
being chosen by you made me fortunate.

Distance corrected that.

You were trusted with tenderness
I had protected for years,
and loved with a depth
you did not have to earn twice.

So yes,

I did you a favor.

I let you know what it felt like
to matter profoundly to someone
who could have given that love anywhere else.

And someday, perhaps,
you will understand exactly what that was worth.

Hopefully by then
I will have stopped caring
whether you ever do.

Old Fashioned

Angel BoucherLeave a comment

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.

Chameleon Hearts

Angel BoucherLeave a comment

I do not know why I cannot let you go,
when you are everything I promised I would never choose.
You carry every warning sign I know,
every kind of love I swore I would refuse.

We have almost nothing in common,
and somehow, we are painfully the same.
Two chameleons changing with the room,
shifting colors just to hear someone say our name.

We learned how to become what others needed,
how to bend before they ever asked us to.
Desperate to be wanted, to be chosen,
to make ourselves enough for someone new.

But you became controlling beneath the charm,
arrogance disguised as certainty and grace.
Careless with the hearts you held too loosely,
always keeping one more option in its place.

You cheated truth before you cheated trust.
You played your games and called them circumstance.
Indecision became another weapon,
keeping me suspended in the hope of chance.

And I know what loving you would cost me.

I would have to soften every boundary,
silence pieces of myself you could not bear.
I would have to shrink to fit your expectations,
change my shape until I disappeared in there.

I refuse.

I have spent too many years becoming
someone I can finally recognize.
I will not trade the woman I have fought for
just to become pleasing to your eyes.

So tell me why my heart still reaches backward.

Why does logic lose its voice when memory speaks?
Why can one remembered moment resurrect you
after I have spent whole months becoming free?

Maybe I do not miss you.

Maybe I miss who I became beside you.
The version of myself who felt enough.
The way you listened like my words were sacred,
the way your attention masqueraded as love.

You made me feel seen
in places I had hidden.

You made me feel chosen
before you made me disappear.

And maybe that is why the wound stays open:
you gave me everything I wanted most to hear.

Then you lied.

You left.

You erased me
with astonishing precision.

As though I had been nothing
but a temporary decision.

And that is what I cannot reconcile.

How someone can memorize the smallest parts of you,
hold your secrets like they matter,
build a future out of careful words,
then walk away
as though there was never anything to shatter.

The cruelest part is knowing
you already knew.

While I was falling,
you were calculating the landing.

While I was building something permanent,
you were already planning your abandoning.

You had an ending
hidden in your pocket
while I was still believing in the start.

And I was foolish enough
to call your architecture fate
while you were quietly designing
how to break my heart.

I hate that I believed you.

I hate that somewhere underneath the anger,
there is still tenderness I cannot kill.

I hate that knowing exactly who you are
has never taught my heart
how not to want you still.

Because you are everything I do not want.

And somehow,
you became the thing
I cannot forget.

A contradiction
wearing the face of a memory.

A lesson
I understand completely
and have not learned yet.

Perhaps that is our final similarity:

Two chameleons
desperate to be loved.

Only I am finally learning
that love should never require
changing color
until no trace of you
remains.

Custom Order

Angel BoucherLeave a comment

If i was made for you,
why was it so easy to walk away?
If I’m custom made,
I shouldn’t be returned.

You went with the used,
and this order is delayed.
Picked up and mislaid,
Forever adjourned.

I was built to fit the shape of your hands,
but you dropped me effortlessly.
I fell to all your commands,
and you left me carelessly.

Tailored to fit you perfectly,
but swapped for the one that doesn’t fit.
It played out so deliberately,
and wishing you would’ve commit.

Custom made is the most expensive price,
never find the perfect match.
Always looking for the fine details,
which you’ll never find in another.

Now you’ll have your final vice,
while wishing you could detach.
Not appreciating what custom made entails,
but hopefully you’re happy with the other.

Never Enough

Angel BoucherLeave a comment

I unstitched my soul, thread by thread,
Unveiled the bruises where my heart had bled.
You watched, and listened, as I stressed
That I’ve never been enough, even at my best.

I placed my truth in your open heart,
A fragile thing we never meant to start.
You showed empathy and held me close,
And let you see my darkest shadows.
My words hung heavy, raw and bare,
“I’m broken,” I strongly declared.

You turned away, unmoved, no regard
While I stood bleeding and scarred.
Now echoes haunt the hollow space
Where once I begged for your embrace.
I gave you all, my breath, my trust
But love was never for me to entrust.

So go, walk on, and leave me here,
Among the ghosts of what was sincere.
I bared it all, my ruin, my pain,
And you walked away, leaving me in chains.

11/29/2025

The Crow’s Probe

Angel BoucherLeave a comment

(Verse 1)
I woke beside the heavy tomb,
A whisper left, impending doom.
Your scent still haunts the bitter air,
But you’re found nowhere.

They said love dies, but it’s a decree
It burns like a burn in third degree
I flew through the graves of what we were,
Digging for truth in the dirt and blur.

(Pre-Chorus)
Every heartbeat you caused to leap
I unearth in the places buried deep

(Chorus)
I’m the crow in distress
Pecking at the lies, I have to assess
Your ghost still lingers in my bones,
As I reminisce at the gravestone
Love’s not gone, it’s just transformed
Cold and black, just like the great storm.

(Verse 2)
Your eyes were candles in the storm,
Now hollow glass that won’t stay warm.
I trace the crime of love’s last breath,
Every touch, a clue to death.

I follow trails of broken tales,
Your voice in the wind, your scent in trails
In the ruin, I found your memory,
Written in soot, like an abandoned penitentiary.

(Pre-Chorus)
You taught me how to live with this bloodstain
Now I wear your memory like a rugged terrain.

(Chorus)
I’m the crow that is in distress
Pecking at the lies, I have to assess
Your ghost still lingers in my bones,
As I reminisce at the gravestone
Love’s not gone, it’s just transformed
Cold and black, just like the great storm.

(Bridge)
Do you feel me in your afterglow?
Does it take you in with the undertow?
I found the heart you buried deep,
It beats for me with a weep.

(Whispered)
I am your reckoning, your requiem’s ping
The truth is, I was your everything.

(Final Chorus)
I’m the crow in distress
Pecking at the lies, I have to assess
Our love’s a corpse that won’t decay,
It feeds the dark, it holds the deepest dismay.
Even the grave can’t make me forget
The crow still asks, “How is the regret?”

11/09/2025