Lilacs in the trash,
Cold tears wet the black plastic.
They twist-tie their past.
(Here’s the long explainer behind Haiku Wednesday. tl;dr? Just roll with it.)
I was crooning along with my favorite Bonnie Raitt song, “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” when CC took off her noise-dampening headphones and asked why I like sad songs. Well, the songs are slow enough for me to understand the words, but really they speak to my romantic soul. I like what we in the writing trade call the “HEA” stories (happily ever after), while at the same time knowing that not all love stories are happy ones.
This particular haiku is not a stinker, in my opinion, but the coda of what must have been a relationship made of smiles and flowers. Alas, not even lilacs could save the protagonist from the inevitable tears of a broken heart. Maybe, just maybe, they’ve started the act of closure and moving on by tying up the garbage bag and throwing away the trash.
Technical notes: Most folks probably would have gone with roses, but gosh, that symbolism is such a cliché. And I changed the gender in this draft from “she” to “they” because everyone cries when their heart is broken. We just don’t see some of their tears.
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