If You Leave Me
by Angelica Cristina Vega
If you leave me,
grant me hesitation for the next.
Leave me like them,
so I know what to expect.
If you leave me,
knit me a sweater of life lessons and regret,
so I may learn how soft anger can feel,
and how warm bitterness can get,
when you wear it too long.
If you leave me, don’t call me names.
Don’t tell me what I can’t be.
Rather, tell me how peaceful the rain looked when I cried,
how the ocean was always too wet for you,
and how you loved me,
but never learned to swim.
If you leave me,
leave me on a Friday
with a grocery list I can’t read
for a dinner we’ll never make.
Give me a map,
marking everywhere but where I am.
Draw me a way home,
that only you could understand.
If you leave me,
leave me a love child
named Pain.
Give them your eyes
and my appetite for staying.
I’ll raise them on everything
we promised not to eat
and call it nourishment.
If you leave me,
promise me you won’t miss me.
Promise me no false tomorrows,
no mornings you don’t intend to wake in.
If you leave me,
dress for the occasion.
Make abandonment look good,
like you had it tailored
before you met me.
If you leave me,
Make fiction of me.
Yell at the world and
convince them it was all my fault.
Tell them I left you broken
for years to come.
Tell it often enough
that I start believing it too.
If you leave me,
come back and do it again.
Leave me over and over,
practice until you perfect it,
until I learn the choreography,
and can leave myself
without your help.
Whatever the combination
I’ll think we shared enough for a call,
but never get one.
I’ll worship you like the sun
I once believed revolved around me,
spinning itself dizzy
and calling it ballet.
I’ll make religion of your orbit,
and mistake repetition for return.
Letting the clearest days
decay what’s left of me
that still believes you owe me one.
If you leave me,
leave the ending loose.
I promise I’ll try not to pull,
I’ll knit around it instead
and forever wonder
why I’m still cold.
About the POet
Angelica Cristina Vega is a dynamic writer and artist whose work explores identity, relationships, motherhood, generational trauma, and the complex ways we learn to love and find ourselves. Her poetry is a deeply personal reflection of her lived experiences, and she uses vulnerability, humor, and her formalized education in developmental psychology to make sense of the intersections between hurt and healing.