Awake

Then, we were among the many friends and faces, wet-eyed, laughing and chatting with a see-you-soon ease. By death and slight of hand we became fewer until it was just I and my voices – of no standing and having a calendar only as something to carry in case.

But you came back to me this afternoon as you said you would. I could hear you speaking to me as I walked by the little park a few blocks from where we had lived. You with me and through you my mind opened onto a room where we all were together again, laughing and chomping delicate and exotic morsels, jesting with one another, drinking, forgetting everything we had promised to hold dear, passing through those moments as if we had centuries to spare.

I have no time to spare and I do not want to sleep through sounds like my boots thudding on uneven sidewalk or the sight of a single fall-reddened leaf hanging at the end of its bare branch, or Latin drums drifting from an upstairs window I-know-not-which-one, or a sweet kiss I can taste that helps me remember -

You and I will be together again soon.

Nothing

Before zero existed, did this space exist or did we, by our giving nothing a name bring it into existence?

What about bits of memory that shoot through my mind only to vanish en route? What happens to the parts of the story I can't quite recall?

And wishes made in childhood, almost grasped, then forgotten? Can they come to me in a surprise one day, fresh-slapped and screaming?

Who suggested this thing called forgetting and called collisions of circumstance a coincidence? Are these just tricks of the mind shields from what we doubt we can hold?

Emptiness sketches the shape of what existed before this silence. In its outline, our former symmetry gives light to this darkness.