You'd think we'd recall best
all the places we met,
but it's mostly the coming
and going we remember—
not the 1970s smell of halls,
not the bluish blush of instrument
panels in the dashes
of nervous cars,
not the cool darkness
pooled inside the movie theaters
or the satisfying
stickiness of their concrete floors;
but the movement of everything—
the swaying of park swings,
the constant velocity
of driving side-by-side so we'd always
age at exactly the same rate,
the steps between us left to take
across the rattling floorboards
of neon gymnasiums.
And then, there's all the other places
we never got the chance to meet,
their colors swirling invisibly
around the contours of our breaths
like odd remnants of dreams—sheer
but opaque, vivid but silent;
how are we supposed to forget
those memories we don't even possess,
which hover like ghosts
in the black voids of windows
outside the foreclosed
mansions of our minds?
How do we explain to ourselves
all those other times
we seem to have met
before we met
for the first time?
