She was the postmaster’s daughter—
fifteen, and serious about everything.
Even laughter.

We spoke of love
like people twice our age
but felt it
like fire at our fingertips.

I remember her hand
on my arm
when we agreed
not to rush.
Both virgins.
Both afraid
of what forever might cost
if we touched it too soon.

We gave each other
everything
but the one thing
we wanted most.

We shared time
in hours
on benches,
by rivers,
between letters,
through windows.

When Denmark called me
and Edinburgh called her,
we said the right things.
We meant them.

For a year
our voices travelled the length of Europe
on wires and stamps.

Then
one day,
nothing.

No letter.
No call.
No reason.

I rang her house.
They’ve moved,
they said.

No forwarding address
for a girl who still lives
at the edge of my life
in a memory
with her hair tied back
and a promise in her pocket.

Not all love stories end.
Some are simply
interrupted.

Interrupted (Part II)

The Old Man Remembers Robyn

I am 85.
There are days
I can barely stand
without remembering
how she stood beside me,
barely sixteen,
looking serious
about everything.

The mirror gives me
this brittle husk.
But behind the eyes—
that boy is still there.
Still hoping for a letter.

Did she marry?
Did she cradle
grandchildren
the way I cradle mine—
with reverence,
with joy,
with the weight of a life
earned?

Sometimes I hope
she forgot me quickly.
That another boy
with steadier hands
gave her the love
I only promised.

Sometimes
I hope she didn’t.

That’s the cruelty of memory—
it edits nothing.
She is still fifteen.
Still waiting.
Still unkissed.

If I find her
on the other side,
I pray
she is older than me.
Lined, wise,
eyes full
of stories I never knew.

Not the girl
who vanished.
Not the girl
frozen by farewell.

Because I loved her.
And I would grieve,
even in death,
to see her again
and find
she never lived at all.

---

Afterword

The two poems in this sequence, collectively titled Interrupted, form a quiet meditation on love that never faded, only vanished from view. They chart the emotional arc of a single man across a lifetime—from the intense but restrained devotion of youth to the reflective yearning of old age.

The first poem captures a rare kind of early love: one chosen for its restraint, not repressed by fear, but shaped by mutual understanding. The speaker and Robyn are adolescents with a bond strong enough to resist the immediacy of desire, trusting in the value of a future they were never given. When Robyn disappears—without explanation, without closure—the relationship isn’t broken. It is, simply, interrupted. Memory becomes the only place where she continues to exist.

The second poem, written from the vantage point of old age, returns to that interruption not to reanimate the past, but to ask the one question that has lingered for decades: what became of her? It is a poem not of regret, but of compassionate longing. The speaker has lived fully—marriage, children, grandchildren—yet the fate of Robyn remains an unfinished chapter. His greatest fear is not that she forgot him, but that she never lived beyond their final moment. He does not want to meet her again as a girl frozen in time. He wants to know that she, too, lived richly, aged with dignity, and became someone beyond his memory.

Interrupted is poetry in the lyric tradition—sparse, emotional, and precise. It allows stillness to speak. It mourns nothing explicitly, but in its quietness, it holds immense feeling. The poems are not an elegy for a person who died, but for a story that was never allowed to finish. And yet, by writing it down—by holding Robyn in language—the speaker gives it a kind of completion. Not all love stories end. Some are simply interrupted.