Weekends Aren't Forever

Long before disgust and despair were all that remained,

long before love soured into a faceless, obnoxious actuality —

you told me you wanted something simple.

A regular love.

Like cappuccino.

Unnecessarily overpriced,

dressed up in froth and foreign names,

customized till it forgot its own bitterness.

You asked for it like you were owed it.

And I heard you.

Because a man learns to hear it all.

That's what good behaviour is.

And good behaviour matters most

right before she asks you to strip her bare

and make it mean something.

I heard you.

But I never quite understood what regular love meant.

I was told my “regular”

was fetishes for the freaks.

That my love

was too strange to be called love

without shame stitched to its middle name.

I was fucking someone

married to someone

who once called me a friend.

Or acquaintance.

Acquaintance fits your guilt better, doesn’t it?

And you —

you were married too,

just not to me.

To a man who wanted you like meat:

served warm,

no promises,

just blood on his canines and convenience in his breath.

And you —

you peeled yourself for him.

Hoping he'd find shelter

in the broken verses you called your body.

But men like that

never stay for breakfast.

And maybe that’s what we had in common —

we were weekends

for people who’d built lives out of weekdays.

So we promised each other

weekday warmth and weekend wildness.

But was it love?

Let alone “regular”?

It was a disaster

with matching bedsheets.

A crime scene disguised as compatibility.

A place where delusion passed for devotion.

So intrinsically fucked,

even poetry would look away politely.

Our faith in ifs, buts, and maybes

outran every proven dysfunction that was us.

Because delusion,

that beautifully misshaped puzzle piece,

fits almost anywhere.

Our families loved us —

but only the parts of us

that smiled on cue

and posed for photographs.

They were fluent in the idea of plurality.

But blind to how violently

our singularities scratched at each other’s sanity.

“Marriages are made in heaven”

was never philosophy —

just a poorly timed punchline.

And humanity?

Too humourless to get it.

You wake up beside the same person every day —

and eventually, truth becomes louder than love.

Even romantics become cynics

capable of ghostwriting nihilism.

We were barely friends.

And even worse lovers.

No poetry in our sex.

No faith in our silences.

Just two actors

pretending to be plot.

And when my life

nose-dived into the jagged bottom

of this ocean called hope,

you turned your face and breath away —

like I stank of consequences.

Like I was a roach crawling

on your spotless wallpaper of self-image.

Ignorance wasn’t your defence —

it was your décor.

You slept like a newborn

beside a man caving in on himself,

and woke up convinced

you had dreamt a healthy life.

But darling —

to fuck someone at 2AM

while ignoring the corpse beside you

takes a kind of delusion

only convenience can afford.

And I?

I hoped.

Stupidly.

Because hope is just heartbreak

with prettier packaging.

You overlooked me

like autocracies forget democracies.

I counted six months —

two quarters of a full-term pregnancy —

that’s how long heartbreak can gestate.

And not once

did you ask,

“How are you?”

But you asked for stories.

Demands, really —

tales dipped in your luxury,

seasoned with your boredom.

Our intimacy had collapsed.

Crumbled under the weight of truths

too heavy for your curated world.

I had made peace with the reality of a failed marriage.

You kept pretending we hadn’t failed.

So,

when I spilled myself

into the rented warmth

of another woman’s thighs,

you screamed

like a wife.

The wife

who had long left home

but kept the keys for the melodrama.

What I did?

Unpardonable.

What you didn’t?

Just “acceptable ambition.”

My betrayal had scent.

Yours —

a shade of lipstick you called loneliness.

You auctioned your emotional fidelity

to half a dozen stranger men 

who remembered you in their midnight boners,

and yet had the audacity

to hold my skin's shared nakedness

to a puritan’s pedestal.

Because your betrayal

came with quotes from Rumi.

And mine?

Came with condoms.

And so,

you turned surveillance into intimacy.

Every step I took,

every wink, every word —

a question in your silent inquisition.

You weren’t loving me.

You were collecting evidence.

You called it love.

I called it

paranoia on a honeymoon package.

Physical loyalty became currency.

Emotional fidelity?

Just some poetic theory

I was stupid enough to believe in.

You let my reputation bleed —

because yours was never on the line.

You whored your emotions,

but never spread your legs —

so that made you

the martyr.

And me?

I fucked.

Yes.

But at least I did it

honestly.

There was no story left between our breaths —

no poetry to exhume,

no intimacy to resurrect.

Just stale air

and the echo of everything

we refused to name.

I sank.

You watched.

Comfortably.

Because it’s easier

to play saint

than save the man you made drown.

So call me what you will —

a selfish, poetic man-whore,

pimping metaphors for moans,

trading pain for rented orgasms.

And you —

keep playing the helpless wife

in the marriage you abandoned

long before I found a way to betray it.

Tonight,

as we crease the same bedsheets

one last time —

I say nothing.

No justifications.

No apologies.

You win.

Because letting go

is the subtlest middle finger

this godforsaken species could never grow a habit of.