To the Girl I Was Before the Sky Fell In - Veronica Tucker
poem read by Timothy Arliss OBrien
To the Girl I Was Before the Sky Fell In
Veronica Tucker
You are sitting cross-legged on your bedroom floor,
cutting your own bangs with kitchen scissors again,
as if reshaping your hair might somehow reshape your life.
I want to tell you it won’t work,
but you already know that, and keep cutting anyway.
You still believe love will be enough to save people.
You haven’t yet learned the way silence can be an answer,
how sometimes the ones who leave
were only meant to pass through you like a windstorm,
leaving behind a drawer you can’t quite close
and the smell of rain you can't place.
I want to say:
You will carry things that don’t belong to you.
You will return them, one by one,
but only after years of believing they were yours.
You’ll find your voice
in a place where people come to forget their names.
You’ll learn to hold grief like a match,
close enough to light the way,
but never long enough to burn.
You’ll run marathons with the same legs
that once folded under the weight of everything.
You will lose things you love.
You will love anyway.
And one day, you’ll sit at a table
with your hands wrapped around a warm cup of matcha,
and realize you have become the kind of person
your younger self would listen to,
not because you have the answers,
but because you stopped pretending you ever did.
Veronica Tucker is a New England writer and physician whose work explores memory, resilience, and
healing. She finds clarity in poetry, matcha, and long runs.
