Poetry: 32 Degrees Fahrenheit by Tehya Wade

32 Degrees Fahrenheit

We’re skating on thin ice my love
We’re running on borrowed time,
That was never ours to begin with.

Please run faster
Because I cannot turn to face
What is gaining on our backs

The last sands are falling
Through our shattered hourglass
Splinters of glass encase
Our interlocked fingers

Don’t take your hand from mine
Hold it
Tighter
Keep your worn hands
From that cruel transparency

We’ve always been skating
On thin ice

Blind to the cracks
Residing beneath the souls
Of our shoes
Blind to everything we lost
   
Between those cracks

We didn't see the fog rolling in

Our eyes, preoccupied
Bewitched upon each other's

My blue
And that green of yours
Laced through every waking twilight
While the fog
Like passively inhaled cigarette smoke
Infested our lungs

The hand wrapped around our airways
Stole our breath

But so delicately entranced
Our eyes refused to part
Putting up and endless fight

We never saw it coming
Protesting the ineludible

Thinning ice,
Our hands.
Borrowed time,
Our shoes.

Fleeting sands,
Our eyes.
Abysmal cracks,
Our lungs.
Impenetrable fog.

We were
Could've been
Could be
Can be
We are inevitable.

It wasn't our time
We may never get our time
Because stolen time
Can never, truly, be ours
Despite how much we've paid for it.

In some other life
The ice is intact.
The sands are infinite.
The cracks have healed.
The fog has migrated.
All of this time
Belongs to no one
But us.

In another life

there is an ‘us’
A life where we always have been
and always will be
Us.

Unconsciously,
I will long for it
The broken promise of that
bittersweet other life.
The forbidden romance
of that other life.
Caged in an unreachable,
unobtainable daydream.

It hangs
so effortlessly
out of arm's reach.
Tantalising our burnt fingertips
Torturing our bleeding lips
Always in sight
Forever in frame
A whisker too far away.

For now i will relish
in each desperate second
that we spent
on that thin ice
that stolen time.

Drowning in the falling sands,
navigating the maze of saw-edged cracks
enveloped in the relentless fog.

You can have all of my seconds.
Each last and lonely one,
that i have left.
Take them as your own.

Given.
Borrowed.
Taken.
Stolen.

Take it all
I will ask for nothing in return
Except
That you keep me from falling through this ice

I will not let you fall
If you offer me the same gesture
In return
Unprompted.

We both know
that we will not surface
from all that lurks below
this frosted, fractured glass

that we run upon.

Skate on thin ice with me.
Pick up those skates,
For me.
Put them on,
For me.
Knot the laces tight,
For me.
Find your balance,
For me.

Fall.
For me.

Skate on thin ice for me.





Tehya Wade is an emerging writer who fell in love with poetry at a very young age, her poetry encases passion, love and loss in a very cathartic manner. 

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