Words Ten Years Ago
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I liked to imagine you young, but I didn’t realize it was true until I got there.
Now that I’m that age, I know how young it feels.
One day you let it slip — “last night in bed he and I were talking and…”
One morning I walked in and you were wearing his shirt, sleeves rolled a dozen times, your slim frame engulfed by the size of him.
Emboldened allusions to intimacy that slipped casually between your handwriting and laughter and perfume.
I wonder if it felt the same as when I wore his shirt to the office, on accident at first, but defiantly later on. Like I was saying, “look at something you know nothing about.”
Maybe the difference was that your eyes were saying “you are too young to know this love” and mine said, “you are too old to know this love.”
Was it the same for you as it was for me, talking in the dark or just sharing space?
I wonder what made you marry him but keep your name. (I told you to take it, now he echoes words ten years ago when we make love).
And I don’t know why it ended. I have some theories, but they are thin.
I want to know if it will happen to me.
They are not the same men, but could they be? We are not the same women, but could we be?
Once, you told me that we stop changing when we turn 21, but now I am older than you were when we met, and I know that souls don’t work that way. Souls live a thousand lives, at once young and wise and foolish and peaceful and restless and brand new.
With him, my soul has grown, but yours had to grow alone.
