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By Daisy Atuhaire

Sometimes we fall in love with a person. Other times, we fall in love with the person we imagine them to be. In The Lover I Invented, Daisy Atuhaire explores the painful space between reality and romantic expectation. Using the language of sewing, tailoring and performance, the poem portrays a lover carefully constructed from desire, half-truths and hope. However, as that imagined relationship begins to unravel, the speaker discovers that the deepest heartbreak may not be losing him at all. It may be realising whom she was trying to find in him.

I sewed a lover from the air,

From half-truths and midnight prayer.

His hands were tailored to my waist,

A perfect fit, with no real taste.

He knew the lines, he knew his part,

A stranger fluent in my heart.

He’d say “forever” without a flinch,

And never moved a single inch.

We waltzed for watchers, blind and kind,

Who saw the frame but not behind.

What looked like love from far away,

Was just two actors learning how to stay.

Now I unpick him, thread by thread,

The words he never truly said.

What hurts is not that he was untrue—

It’s that I almost made him you.

— Daisy Atuhaire

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