Three's A Crowd

by Corinne Caraway

After I found out about you, 

I kept letting him be 

the worst of himself   

so you could have the rest.

I guess you could say 

that was selfless of me,

but wasn't it pretty selfish of me 

to let him be any kind of 

around me at all? 

If I was keeping him to feel numb 

when he was still in love,

maybe I was in the wrong.

But wasn't it selfish of him 

to want us at the same time,

when he was going to leave 

us both behind anyway? 

Was it selfless to walk away 

before you caught on, 

or just a kind of self-preservation 

of whatever self I had left?

Terrified of the someday 

someone would ask me 

to tell them about myself, 

and how empty I would feel

if I didn't have a self to tell about?