Søren AasPeak Us
A Confessional
I wrote it in ten minutes. I didn't plan it. I didn't sit down thinking I was going to write a poem. I just needed to say something and it came out like that, all at once, and when I read it back I thought — yeah, that's it. That's the thing.
This article is about the poem Peak Us
It starts with upbringing because that's where it actually starts. We didn't just build a life together, we built the life we'd been handed. The dream our bloodlines had for us. Two people who were good at thinking, good at doing, good at constructing the right thing — and for a long time it worked. That's the part people might not expect me to say, but it's true. It worked. We just forgot that working isn't the same as living.
We were so busy doing that we stopped being. And at some point I looked up and realised we were living out other people's wills, not our own. That's a strange thing to realise. It doesn't arrive loudly.
The line people seem to stop at is in the same heartbeat I loved you until I didn't. I put it that way because that's how it actually felt. Not a slow fade. Not a decision I made over months. One moment, and both things were true at the same time. I've never been able to explain that to anyone in conversation. But in the poem it just sat there and made sense.
After that it's just loss. The particular kind of loss where you're not even angry, you're just cold. And the thing that haunts me isn't the big stuff, it's the small stuff. The muscle memory. I am forgetting how I held you. That line scared me a little when I wrote it because I knew it was true.
I chose myself. I had to. But survival on its own is bleak. You save yourself and then you're standing in the dark going — right, now what? Her faith in me, her warmth, her light — that was real. I'm not pretending it wasn't. The apology in the poem is a real apology.
And then the ending. The breakup email. That's the thing I couldn't get away from. All of that — everything the poem holds — and the way it actually ended was an email. I didn't have the courage or the clarity to do it face to face. The most important ending of my life went through a compose window. There's no way to make that poetic. So I just said it plainly. And somehow that plainness is the most honest thing in the whole poem.
I posted it, then posted an empty hourglass, then just a link to Tempest by Ethel Cain. No words. It didn't need any.
Some things you don't explain.
You just put them down and walk away.
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