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Poetry by Rowan Evans

Tag: emotional memory

  • Can’t Tell the Difference | A Poem About Dreams, Memory, and Love

    Rowan Evans

    Author’s Note

    Sometimes the mind doesn’t separate things as cleanly as we’d like.

    Memory, imagination, longing–they start to overlap. What you’ve felt in dreams can become just as vivid as something you’ve physically lived. And after a while, the line between the two doesn’t disappear… it just stops mattering in the same way.

    Can’t Tell the Difference lives in the space.

    It’s not about confusion in a chaotic sense–it’s about the quiet disorientation of something feeling real enough to hold weight, even if you prove it happened the way you remember.

    Because emotion doesn’t always follow logic.

    And sometimes the question isn’t “did this happen?”
    It’s “why did it feel like it did?”

    — Rowan Evans

    Person standing above a glowing city at night, with blurred dreamlike figures walking hand-in-hand below, symbolizing the line between memory and reality.
    Where memory and dreams blur—
    and feeling becomes its own kind of truth.

    Can’t Tell the Difference
    Poetry by Rowan Evans

    I stand on the edge
    of what’s real—
    and what isn’t.

    But I can’t tell
    the difference.

    Is it a dream,
    or a memory?

    I don’t know anymore.

    I’ve held your hand before.
    I know I have—
    there is no way,
    that was just a dream.

    It was too real.

    I could feel
    the sweat on your skin,
    the heat in the air—
    humidity clinging,

    busy streets alive
    with Jeepney beeps.

    So what is real?
    Is it what you’ve lived—
    or what you feel?

    Was it real
    or a dream,
    when I looked you in the eye,
    and said—

    I love you.

    Because I felt that.

    I felt the words
    leave my lips—

    I love you…

    echoing,
    like a record skipped.

    Every night
    in my dreams,
    I meet you
    on city streets.

    We walk,
    we talk,
    hand in hand—

    conversations
    only I could imagine.

    We talk about life,
    but never the future—
    just the now.

    The current moment.

    Because we move the same—
    drifting forward,
    unchained.

    And still—

    I stand on the edge
    of what’s real,
    and what isn’t.

    And I can’t tell
    the difference.

    If you’re interested in more poetry, you can find it here → [The Library of Ashes]

  • On Rereading the Weather I Once Wrote | Reflections on Poetry & Emotional Memory

    Rowan Evans

    On Rereading the Weather I Once Wrote

    Overcast sky with light breaking through clouds, symbolizing reflection and emotional awareness
    Sometimes the weather changes before we know how to name it.

    There’s a strange kind of déjà vu that comes from rereading your own work — not the kind where you remember writing it, but the kind where you realize your past self was already speaking truths your present self hadn’t lived yet.

    Lately I’ve been revisiting poems I wrote in late 2024, and the experience has been… uncanny. Not prophetic, exactly. More like watching an old storm roll across a landscape you now know by heart. The sky shifts in familiar ways. The pressure drops. The air tastes the same. And you think, How did I not see what was coming?

    But that’s the thing about emotional weather:
    your subconscious feels the front long before your conscious mind names it.

    Those poems weren’t about anyone in particular. They were about the shape of the love I was ready for — the kind that’s earned, not conjured; the kind that asks for depth, not spectacle; the kind that might be temporary but still real enough to leave traces in the soil.

    Looking back, I can see the tension in the lines.
    The longing.
    The caution.
    The quiet readiness.
    The fear of being left.
    The acceptance that even fleeting connection can matter.

    I wasn’t predicting the future.
    I was describing the architecture of my own heart — the way I love, the way I protect, the way I brace for loss without closing myself off from meaning.

    It’s odd, reading those pieces now.
    Odd, but also grounding.

    It reminds me that my voice has always known things before I did.
    That my writing has always been a barometer.
    That the storms I walk through don’t arrive unannounced — I just don’t always listen to the wind until it’s already shifting.

    So this isn’t a poem.
    Just a note from the present Rowan to the past one:

    You weren’t wrong.
    You weren’t naïve.
    You were already reading the weather.

    And you were right to write it down.