There are stages to move through
and not to grow in, because progress
perishes between these suffocating lines.
You are lost in the finest sense of forever:
I know not where to seek you,
how to remember you, yet you whip through me still,
time’s drag of memorial circumstance
shifting the paths my steps forge and trip over.
I thought it was over
when we said so. But you are never over,
you are permanent
in the grains of my psyche, you reflect back
in movement and thought.
Your hazy influence
silently spreads over me
like translucent pollen blown free
from its stemmed beginnings.
I act around you, no longer for you,
and despite you, never again
toward you. My body reels from your
lost touch, my fingertips bruised
from scraping and clawing
to the depths of these memories. And yet,
the residue remains. I fear you are here
forever.
But that word—forever—
you taught me how to not believe in it
which means the dust and webs may fade, too.
Your lingering influence,
your jarring interruptions:
these, too, will go. It will all leave—the when’s,
the what-ifs, the remember-that’s,
the how could I’s,
how could you’s,
all of you will leave.
And yet I will remain,
the blurred photocopy of before and after.
