The day opens like a strange flower,
in the cold morning of someone's No,
the sky hanging loose like a shirt too big
for the shoulders of what-could-have-been.
Love isn't something you take to a return counter,
there is no receipt, no false promise—
but how odd it is, to be turned away
with the full inventory of your heart
stocked up, unsellable.
A misplaced moonlight, you think,
this tenderness, these eccentric tides
that rise and ripple within you—
yet here stands the gate of refusal,
where your yearning is not welcomed in.
How can the heart be treated as refuse,
as though it were a letter unopened
and stamped "Return to Sender,"
when it was never even mailed,
but handed over, palms bare,
as something living, vulnerable—?
It isn't just you, standing there.
The trees, too, curl their leaves inward,
the river beneath the bridge slows,
the stones wear their loneliness openly.
Maybe love isn't what gets rejected.
Maybe it's the way someone else's eyes
looked into yours and simply saw
the wrong constellation, a different gravity.
Maybe it's a dance of refusal
that is not about you, nor love,
but how two mismatched hands
never learn the same rhythm.
Still, what strange creatures we are,
to think that someone else's silence
could ever be the death of what blooms,
or that rejection is a line drawn straight
in a universe curved by our own longing.
For now, the evening washes in,
like ink in water, and you stand
not as the unchosen, but as the one
who stands—still, amid the fading light—
with love still in the pocket of your hand,
unspent, unchanged, ready.
And what does rejection mean, then,
when the heart goes on in its quiet insistence,
eccentric as it is, refusing to be anything
less than what it feels, despite everything.
