The Morpheme of Heartbreak

“I really loved you.”

There it was—
a voiced alveolar-dental stop
placed on the end of the word.

“I really loved you.”

And in that brief articulation
—the tongue tapping against the little ridge above the teeth,
the vocal cords humming away—
my world fell apart.

Nothing can disrupt the present
or foreclose the future
like the past tense.
That little pop told me
that the things I had hoped for,
prayed for—
now lay in the unretrievable past.

One little morpheme
and a life forever changed.

One fleeting voiced alveolar-dental stop,
and my heart lay broken once again.