Writing About Love, Shame and Realising Too Late
Some poems are written carefully.
Others arrive like emotional wreckage.
I Won’t Look Back was one of those poems.
It was one of the first long-form poems I ever wrote, before I fully understood my own style as a poet. Looking back now, I can see the rough edges, the repeated phrases, the emotional overflow and the rawness running through it. But I can also see something else — honesty.
I Won’t Look Back is written from lived experience and holds a place in my heart.
At its core, I Won’t Look Back is not really about darkness, drugs, obsession or chaos, even though all of those things live inside the poem.
The real heart of the saga is this:
Someone believing they do not deserve love… and only realising they truly had it once it was gone.
The narrator carries a life full of damage, self-destruction and emotional ruin. She sees herself as dangerous to love, too broken to keep anything good alive. Because of that, every act of tenderness feels temporary, suspicious or impossible.
Then she meets someone who stays.
Someone who sees the darkness clearly and loves her anyway.
That “anyway” matters.
Not despite a bad mood.
Not despite imperfections.
But despite the chaos, the self-destruction, the emotional scars and the belief that love could never truly belong to her.
That is why the relationship becomes so consuming.
The narrator is not just falling in love.
She is experiencing emotional safety and acceptance in a way she never believed possible.
And because she cannot fully believe she deserves it, she keeps trying to push it away.
That is the tragedy buried underneath the dark romance themes.
The narrator spends most of the saga trying to protect the woman she loves from herself, believing eventually she will ruin her, contaminate her or destroy something good.
But life does not wait for emotional clarity.
By the time the narrator fully understands the depth of the love she was given, it is already gone.
That is why the title I Won’t Look Back became so important to me.
Because throughout the saga the narrator keeps insisting she will not look back, while emotionally doing exactly that. The entire poem is one long look backwards into grief, regret and memory.
It becomes less of a statement of strength and more of a survival mechanism.
The ending of the saga was important to me because I did not want it to feel neat, healed or resolved. Grief rarely works that way. Love, regret and loss do not suddenly disappear because time moves forward.
By the final part of the saga, the narrator is emotionally exhausted. The darkness she once believed lived inside her has returned, but now it carries the added weight of regret. She finally understands she was loved deeply, fully and honestly — but that understanding arrives too late.
The repeated line:
“I won’t look back”
Becomes emotionally contradictory by the ending.
Because the narrator is looking back constantly.
She sees the woman she lost:
– in the rain
– in the shadows
– in the wind
– in memory
– in every beautiful thing left behind
The phrase slowly changes from defiance into survival.
The narrator keeps saying it because looking back hurts too much, yet emotionally she cannot escape it. That tension became one of the emotional anchors of the entire saga.
I wanted the ending to feel haunted, wandering and unfinished — like someone carrying love and grief at the same time, unable to fully put either down.
Not every love story ends with healing.
Some leave permanent fingerprints on the soul.
The saga also taught me something important about my own writing.
Even in my earliest work, I was drawn towards:
– emotional contradiction
– love mixed with fear
– darkness mixed with tenderness
– confessional storytelling
– cinematic imagery
– psychologically damaged narrators
– recurring emotional motifs
Looking back now, I can see the beginnings of the voice that would later shape collections like Fractured Mind and The Lie.
The poem is imperfect.
Raw.
Overfull in places.
But I think that is part of why it still matters to me.
Some poems are polished into silence.
This one still bleeds.
Thank you for reading
Your DislexicPoet 🖤