In Another Room

​​​​​​

They say—

(and I’m no physicist, you know that)—

that if the universe refuses to end,

if it keeps spilling outward,

and the pieces that build it are finite,

then sooner or later everything that can happen will happen,

must happen—

again and again,

until there are no new songs left to sing.

​

The same faces,

the same hands reaching across the same tables,

only the chairs a little different,

the laughter a beat earlier,

the yes instead of the almost.

 

And somewhere in all that sprawling symmetry,

there’s another me.

Another you.

Another room like this one—

only brighter.

 

Maybe he is better with you than I was.

Maybe the hurt never finds its teeth.

Maybe you both wake on a Sunday,

and the only ache between you

is from laughing too hard the night before.

 

And maybe he says it—

on time, in time—

so cleanly it never frays.

Maybe he never knows how close it came to breaking,

because it never does.

 

And if he does—

Goddamnit, if he does—

I would not take that from him.

​

Even if I could.

Even if I could unstring myself,

tear through every stubborn particle,

thread my body through the eye of whatever needle

holds the universe together,

I would not knock at his door.

Because someone always loses.

 

In the thousands,

and thousands,

and thousands of rooms,

someone was always going to stand alone in the quiet.

Someone had to carry the weight of almost.

​

When the quarks tumbled,

when the dice were cast,

when the strings stitched the cosmos

into you and me,

and not-you and not-me,

it was always going to be someone.

This time, it’s me.

And that’s all right.

 

Because in a thousand other rooms,

maybe I never even found you.

Maybe I never even knew your name.

Maybe I lived and died,

and the sky never bent low enough

to let me hear you laugh.

 

But here—

at least—

I loved you.

I lost you.

But I loved you first.

 

And that is more than most universes

would ever dare to promise.

 

I am no physicist.

I don’t know how the stars stumble back

into their old mistakes,

how matter folds itself into near-perfect echoes,

how the same dust can spell a thousand poems

and still call them all love.

 

I only know:

somewhere, in another room,

you are laughing.

Somewhere, in another room,

I am holding your hand.

Somewhere, in another room,

the sun rises just for us.

 

And that is enough for me.

 

​​​

By Erik Bodien

​

​

Erik Bodien is a student of social anthropology at the London School of Economics. His poems explore intimacy, loss, and the quiet absurdity of being alive.

 

IG: @u.vers