“RUNNING BACK”

RUNNING BACK

Today is show day.

Tonight, I’ll stand onstage in Los Angeles and perform pieces of a story I’m still living through. Show days are strange when the art is autobiographical. Everything gets louder. The excitement is louder. The gratitude is louder. The adrenaline is louder.

The pain is louder, too.

There is something uniquely exhausting about loving someone you keep trying to leave in the past.

You move forward. You build a routine. You create new patterns. You stop checking. You stop waiting. You fill your calendar. You travel. You work. You laugh for real—not the kind of laugh you use to convince everybody you’re okay.

Then something happens.

A memory. A song. A place. A tiny piece of hope.

You run back.

“Running Back” is romantic because I wrote it from a place that was still hopeful. I wasn’t standing on the other side of love writing an autopsy. I was still inside it. Part of me still believed there was a version of this story where two people could stop hurting each other long enough to remember why they chose each other on that first lunch date in Atlanta on May 31, 2023.

The hardest thing about running back isn’t the running.

It’s what happens to you every time you arrive.

You go back with a little more caution than the time before. You offer trust again, except now you’re offering trust that has scar tissue. You tell yourself not to punish this moment for the last one. You try to believe what you’re being told. You try not to anticipate the next disappearance, disappointment, misunderstanding or broken promise.

Then the trust breaks again.

Every time it does, you don’t simply return to the heartbreak you had before.

You break from a lower place.

That’s the part I didn’t understand.

I thought reconciliation meant returning to zero. It doesn’t. Sometimes you’re starting again with a negative balance. You’re carrying the original hurt, the repair attempt, the hope you invested in the repair, and now the grief of discovering that the repair didn’t hold.

Still, you miss them.

God, you miss them.

Sometimes you miss someone badly enough that the chaos of loving them feels preferable to the quiet of living without them.

That isn’t a romantic sentence to me anymore. It’s just an honest one.

Someone I loved once told me about finally realizing that her life was better without a former partner. That realization was what allowed her to move on.

I’ve thought about that a lot.

I don’t think I’m there.

I can’t write some triumphant paragraph telling you my life is so much better without the person I love because that wouldn’t be true.

My life is good.

Those aren’t the same statement.

I still have adventures. I still travel. I still find myself in beautiful hotels and ridiculous situations. I get on airplanes. I perform. I meet fascinating people. I laugh. I make memories. I have work I care about. I have people who love me. There are moments when I look around and think, This is incredible.

The ache is that another thought sometimes arrives right behind it:

I wish she were here.

That’s one of the loneliest versions of missing someone—when your life hasn’t stopped.

There isn’t some empty existence waiting for them to return and make it meaningful. There is a whole life happening.

You just still want to turn toward a particular person and say, Look at this.

I wanted to share the hotel room.

The flight.

The stupid thing that happened at the airport.

The view.

The food.

The story I couldn’t wait to tell.

The silence at the end of an exhausting day when neither of us needed to entertain the other.

I wanted the person, not a replacement for the person.

There is a difference.

THE EMBARRASSING PART OF HOPE

“Running Back” ends with what is essentially a message sent into the universe:

Give me something.

An emoji.

A sign.

Some tiny indication that says, I’m still here too.

The implication is almost ridiculous after everything that came before it: after all this time, after everything we’ve put each other through, after everything I’ve learned—

I might still come running back.

I hear that ending differently now.

Not because I suddenly don’t love the person anymore.

I do.

My love isn’t past tense simply because the relationship is.

Reality and love can coexist. I know we’re not together. I understand what I was asked to do, and I respect it. I don’t disrupt her life. I don’t send messages through friends. I don’t manufacture reasons to make contact. I don’t send pigeons, smoke signals or carefully disguised “accidental” texts.

Leaving somebody alone when they ask you to leave them alone is also an act of love.

It just isn’t the cinematic kind.

The romantic part of me still understands the woman who recorded that ending. I understand why she left that tiny door cracked open.

She wasn’t weak.

She was in love.

There is a difference between wanting someone back and believing you should abandon yourself to get them back.

I’m learning that difference in real time.

RUNNING BACK TO WHAT?

That’s the question underneath the song for me now.

When you say you want somebody back, what exactly are you asking to return to?

The person?

The relationship?

The promise?

The possibility?

The version of yourself who still believed everything could be repaired?

Sometimes I think grief makes a highlight reel and calls it evidence.

It hands you the tenderness without the confusion. The laughter without the conflict. The plans without the disappointments. The intimacy without the moments you felt unseen.

Then your heart says, Run.

Healing has required me to look at the entire film.

The beautiful parts were real.

The painful parts were real too.

Loving somebody deeply doesn’t require me to rewrite either one.

I can admit that there were moments when I went back because I genuinely believed we could do better. There were moments when I went back because I missed her. There were moments when hope was stronger than evidence.

There were probably moments when I preferred familiar chaos to unfamiliar grief.

That’s difficult to admit.

It’s also useful to know.

I STILL DON’T HAVE THE CLEAN ENDING

I wish this blog ended with some fabulous declaration about never running back again.

That would make a much cleaner story.

It just wouldn’t be mine.

I don’t know what I would do if life put that person in front of me again under completely different circumstances. I know I wouldn’t pretend nothing happened. I know love alone wouldn’t be enough. Trust would have to be rebuilt instead of requested. Accountability would have to live in the room with affection. Whatever came next would have to be something new, because repeatedly resurrecting the old relationship only taught us how to hurt inside something familiar.

Still, I won’t rewrite my heart for the sake of sounding empowered on the internet.

I love her.

I miss her.

I am also moving.

All three things are true.

Perhaps the biggest change is that I’m beginning to understand that running back to someone and moving forward with someone are not the same thing.

One repeats a pattern.

The other requires two people to create a new one.

“Running Back” captured the part of me that would have taken an emoji as enough reason to grab my shoes.

Today?

An emoji would probably still make my heart skip a beat.

I’m human.

Then I’d need some words.

A lot of words.

And probably a therapist with an opening that week.

Today is show day.

Tonight I have to take all of that onto a stage.

That’s the strange contract you make when you turn your life into art: eventually, the studio lights go off, the record comes out, and you’re standing under stage lights having to say those words again—except now you know everything that happened after you wrote them.

Tonight the joy will be louder.

The music will be louder.

The audience will be louder.

The pain may be louder, too.

I’m going to say the poem anyway.

Track #5: “Running Back.”

“A Toxic Love” For Your Grammy Consideration in the Spoken Word-Poetry category: Queen Sheba x Chanté Moore x Lil Ronnie