After Happily Ever After

And now when I have found myself indifferent towards you, stopped measuring myself against your dim affection, you say that you will place me in the foreground. Let me go.

This future which you offer me is fashioned from old memories, brittle cardboard cut-outs abandoned to the rain.

And now that I have learnt from you degrees of separation, you are dogged in your fawning, a slavering silhouette, obeisant as a whipped young hound, too cringing to my catness and my wayward fiery eyes.

You will not cage me in or leash me. I have never had a craving for kenneling or grovelling.

The fading page degenerates in shades of ash and brown.