The Balance Due

Found it tucked behind a photograph

of someone I used to know, laugh,

an IOU, scribbled quick,

a promise that still makes me sick.

Not money, no, nothing so clean.

More like a ghost of what had been,

a silent contract, written in haste,

all the good intentions gone to waste.

The ink so faint, it almost melts,

like all the reasons I never felt

right enough to seal the deal,

to say the words, to make it real.

It was just a cheap card, yellowed now,

still in its envelope, somehow

stuck there, under everything else,

a debt I owe only to myself.