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.