on Thursdays we write ballads: “midnight love” & “missing you in 4/4 time”
here’s to sharing some poetry because I am great with academics but stupid with love.
Overachievers, I’m feeling experimental this week.
Which is why I decided to switch up from my usual schedule of publishing essays on the weekend. This week, I decided that I’d like to share some poetry, so here we are. If this goes really well, it could be the start of something new for both of us— you seeing a different side of me via writing, and me committing to writing way more than I do. So this Thursday, and (hopefully) every Thursday going forward, I’ll share poems of different forms that I loved writing (not just ballads), and I’d like these poems to be something that can start a discussion about its themes, how they apply to our personal lives or life in general, and anything else that I hope my poems inspire in you, overachiever. Of course, your weekend programming hasn’t changed (how could I do that to you?), but just be ready to see a bit more of me from now on :)
Midnight Love by Weyimi
When my friends ask if I’m in a relationship I always answer:
“Its complicated”
Because I can’t tell them about how
Like midnight, our love is dark and mysterious but there’s small pockets of sweet, bright light
I can’t explain to them
That even though you would never acknowledge me in public
At least I get to pick up your broken pieces
And beg you in tears not to push me away when you do
They will never understand
The satisfaction I’ve convinced myself to feel
Gluing you back together
With your head in my lap, wasted, telling me everything you’d never say sober
With the fire from when our bodies collide
They won’t see
Your texts at 3 am
Telling me about my willpower and my strength and the power I carry in my body
And how I look great in anything
Or the little notes you sneak into the pocket of my bag
Or even this poem I write about us
They will never see
Because you said people, especially teenage people,
Always ruin these types of things
But maybe you’re the type of person that will ruin me
Because we’re just two lonely people
That need to feel beautiful again
I know all this
But yet, if you happened to text me tonight
I will find my way
Once again
Into your two faced embrace
some lore behind the tragedy:
I wrote this poem in 2023, when I was broken up with one of my exes (I’ll call him Latter because I dated him second) and deep into a long distance situationship with the other (who I’ll call Former because I dated him first). I’d always felt this unexplainable attraction to Former, even after he broke up with me in a not so subtle way on the first day back at school. There was something always bringing us back together, and even after I changed countries, that hadn’t changed. I thought it was because our story was a love story, so I continued to let his voice soothe me to sleep on summer nights, refused to block him and let him come back into my life every once in a while when he felt like he hadn’t talked to me in a minute. And every time he did, I’d be consumed by him before he disappeared again. This didn’t stop until I decided I was ready to take off the rose-colored lenses through which I saw him— and instead of a tortured, yearning, complicated thing, I began to see codependency, a trauma bond, and one sided obsession and yearning.
This didn’t stop, we didn’t stop until long after I wrote this poem.
Missing You in 4/4 Time by Weyimi
Hey lover,
Yes, it’s me/ I’m sure you noticed all your calls to me forwarded to voicemail/ I’m sure you noticed that all the letters you sent never got a response/
I know I left you and I left Maine all behind/ I left because as much as my heart ached with my love for you, it also ached for the dream I needed to make a reality/ you know that my soul always spoke in a flat major and my heart beat in 4/4 time/ I left because I knew if I didn’t, I would never leave/ your dream would become our dream, but what about my dream?/
you must know that leaving didn’t rearrange my heart/ it didn’t end my longing/ I lost my soul the day I decided to leave, and I don’t know if it ever came back/
I wanna go back to playing my poorly produced songs in poorly managed bars on pulsating Friday nights/ I wanna go back to laying in bed with you/ your laugh behind my ears as I came up with bad lyric after bad lyric/ i wanna go back to when we’d be stuck in traffic on a hot afternoon and I’d say “If only there were cameras in the traffic lights, they'd make me a star”/I wanna go back just to see the longing in your eyes when you talked about Maine/ I didn’t realize when I decided to leave/ that your spirit had become so tethered with mine/ I didn’t realize that my spirit needed to be with yours/
dear lover/ if you must be assured of anything, know this: / that every strum of my guitar/ and every word of my lyrics/ and every thrash of the drums/ on every song on every album was picked just for you/ so you’d never forget to remember me/ and so you’d know that I was always thinking about you/ even long after I was gone/
some lore behind the tragedy:
Is it a letter or a poem? I wrote “missing you” as a response to one of my followers on Instagram who’d asked me to write a poem based on the song “Maine” by Noah Kahan. It was my first time ever listening to a Noah Kahan song, and at first, I felt nothing. No jolt to write. No immediate inspiration. Turns out, I just had to let the song marinate for a couple of days, and after reading through the lyrics again and again, it began to remind me of one of my favorite Fleetwood Mac songs, Silver Springs. While both “Maine” and “Silver Springs” sing about an unending yet finite and complex love, the former talks about a relationship that was cut short due to differences in goals and the idea that as we grow, we may have to cut our relationships short because they may not fit with what we really want out of life, while the latter song talks about a relationship suffocated by its own toxicity. What brings both songs together is the fact that they make it clear that even if their relationships ended, the love between them never will. Keeping this in mind for my poem that would be based on “Maine”, I decided that my poem would be a response, from the perspective of Kahan’s muse, the one that left him and left a festering wound called heartbreak in its wake. The one who’s voice he can’t stop hearing, the one who, every time he hears another song from, his heart runs down memory lane. The one who loved music more than she would even love Maine.
Remember, overachievers, on Thursdays, we write ballads. And you don’t have to wear pink
-Weyimi
Since you love the post so much, why not be here to stay? Subscribe to The Overachiever Diaries to become one of us (I’d say that we’re pretty dang cool)!! We’d love to have you as a part of our growing community, and feel free to even support financially via a pledge, if you can :)
Love what you read? Want to read more of my writing? Click the button below to follow my writing account (weyimiwrites) to find passionate overachievers like you!