Answer: The Future

T'was the future held me back

Searching for true love

In the lie of romanticism

I sought the impossible

The more I searched, bullet lists extended

Until all life was eliminated

Reality spoke to me:

I wanted me!

Myself--no one else

But I wasn't enough

I searched for that someone

Who wasn't me

I searched for all the checked boxes

A search miserable and senseless delay

Of important things

A large, ugly toad

Leapfrogging ahead

Postponements I might never catch

Then, at long last

My search distracted by someone

Beautiful inside and out

Soft and kind and

Good to me

Were all boxes checked?

Alas, no

Should I await perfection

The perfect list? or settle?

My epiphany:

The obstacle holding me back

Lifted and making way

Communion with another

A lifelong process, the future reaching back

Into the past, out of order

As if it had always been

Timelines are irrelevant

When ascending above it

A new contender

Conceived in raw material

Tweaked and refined

Melded into a third being

Altogether

A Holy Trinity

If God is love

I turned from Him

Insisting on all of the assinine boxes

Boxes with as much

Relevance to the future

As unicorns

Love--

Between two hermaphroditic beings

--A time to interdigitate

I look back now on my choice back then

One of the great choices of history

Destiny recognized only when destiny realized

The future tethered to a past

Just as loving

Dragged into the present

Forever in the future

Where a priori countered by deja vu

Adds a loving dash of que sera sera