The One That Got Away Poem by Za7ra Sulaiman

It always began quietly.
A little celebration,
just us—
you sneaking me in through the back door
of your mother's house,
where shadows knew our names
better than we knew ourselves.

I might've spilled my drink on the carpet,
but what really leaked that night
was everything I had buried—
not intention, but inevitability.
The kind of truth that slips through your lips
when the room is too dim
to lie.

We called it conversation.
But beneath the words
were blueprints—
hopes folded like paper cranes:
You'd go to college,
I'd get a job,
we'd meet in the middle of growing up
and never look back.

I wanted to believe
that mapping out a future
could anchor us
in something real.

But the days moved on
without asking our permission.
You changed your number,
I changed my sleep schedule—
started dreaming in past tense.

Maybe we'll get it right
in some other timeline.
Where summer after high school
never ended,
where the Mustang still waits,
engine humming with Radiohead,
and the ink on our matching tattoos
hasn't yet started to fade.

We were rebels,
stealing liquor and tomorrows,
climbing rooftops like we were gods
daring the sky to forget us.

But plans—
no matter how loudly whispered—
rarely survive the silence
that comes after love.

And now,
you're a song I don't play
but can't delete.
A name I don't say
but still find
between lines of books and bus windows.

I heard you removed the tattoo.
I didn't cry—
but I felt it,
like someone erasing my name
from a page I never got to finish.

If there's another life,
maybe I'd be brave enough to stay,
or maybe you wouldn't have let go.
Maybe the universe
would finally be kind to us.

Until then—
I'll keep falling for ghosts,
dominoes tumbling
from the hundredth floor of memory,
trying to find the door
to what we could've been.

You were the story
I wasn't ready to close.
And still,
you are the one
who got away.