* This isn't the entire poem, just the last stanza. I'm sure you can find the entire thing online quite easily (I know I did).

Ballade at Thirty-five

Pictures pass me in long review,--
Marching columns of dead events.
I was tender, and, often, true;
Ever a prey to coincidence.
Always knew I the consequence;
Always saw what the end would be.
We're as Nature has made us -- hence
I loved them until they loved me.

-- Dorothy Parker

She watches him, sneaks glances when she thinks no one will notice. He’s been looking distracted and worried lately, like something is gnawing at him. She’s tried to approach him casually in the break room about it, but he just brushes her concerns away. He’s been brushing her away a lot lately, she’s noticed. Like he’s got a secret and he’s afraid she’ll figure it out just by looking at him. Truth is, she’s got her own secret to worry about.

She thinks she might be in love with him. Before she goes to bed at night, she twists that ring around her finger and wonders. She’s talked to her mom about it - just a little. Her mother reassures her that it’s just cold feet, that she’s just nervous and trying to distract herself.

It doesn’t feel like a distraction.

It feels more like guilt mixed with a love she can’t define because no dictionary ever made has a section for things like this. She wakes up in the middle of the night, grinding her teeth and muttering angry words. She has a lot of dreams where she’s yelling at herself. She never hears the words, so she doesn’t know which parts of her are fighting and which one is winning.

In the mornings, she leaves the dreams on the pillow and goes into work. And it looks like he’s maybe having similar dreams at night, but they never talk about it. They don’t talk about anything serious anymore. They pretend that things like wedding dates and plane tickets don’t exist. It’s awkward and uncomfortable and she hates it and she thinks she loves him and she can’t help it and she doesn’t know what to do. She thinks she should probably forget it because there’s a ring on her finger and it weighs about a million pounds.

The air is warm on the night of Michael’s casino fundraiser and bits of asphalt crunch under her shoes in the parking lot. They’re still not talking about wedding dates and plane tickets, but then he says something that’s so much more important than either of those. He’s saying what she’s been thinking, but... God, is the ring getting heavier? Is it itching? Burning? She twists it around her finger, hoping the irritation will stop, but realizes that no matter how many times she turns that damn ring it’s not going to reverse anything.

She can’t love him. She knows she does, but she can’t. She tells herself it’s just the damn cold feet. She can’t be in love with him. Not now. He’s got the timing all wrong. He waited too long. She waited too long. She could’ve taken this into her own hands, sure, but... there’s that damn ring again. Every time she looks down at her own hands, the hands that have done nothing, she can only see that ring.

She fumbles through the conversation like a drunk through a sobriety test. It’s messy and she’s doing it all wrong. She watches herself fall flat on her face when she forces out, “I can’t.”

She sees how he loves her now and all she knows is that if he loves her, she can’t love him because that isn’t safe. If she only loves him, secretly, where no one knows, everything can still be okay and everything can be the same. But if he loves her, then nothing is safe anymore and nobody is calling ‘Olly olly oxen free.’ There are no take backs in this game and that means there can be no love backs. If she goes out into the open, she’s going to get caught and nothing will be the same - and little Pammy Beesley doesn’t take risks like that.