All of history repeats once a year. Love unrequited as a new type of relationship and everyone’s doing it. Starting over, final states, tempting predetermination. Hunting for novel interiors that remind me a little of places I went lightheaded and with grass-stained shoulders, tidally locked, burning up on one side and turning blue on the other. A hand on my back, the appropriate dress for the weather. You will have many more summers laying on that hill or being held in that river. 

I guess you really are always moving forward, and it’s only unlucky that the behind and in-front seem to move along at the same speed at which you’re capable of flinging yourself. Surrounded. In defeat I throw my chin back and find my recent dreams twisting over my head as if they wouldn’t move up higher by the same distance as my heel comes from the floor on tip-toe. I’m on the train out of here thinking about freight hoppers and what it would take to pry coupling from coupling, and you have no idea that you have anything to do with it. It doesn’t make that much sense actually.

How can you be farther away now than the distance either of us have covered?

Still I can identify your silhouette, blindly pieced together in three dimensions from probing fingers dug into your eyes, ears, and mouth, and memorized just in case. I imagine you being struck in the stomach with a cannonball, an indiscernible bled-out tattoo, a hole in your chest, and then the freckles on your neck flash in the corner of my eye and I’m back in the river. This looks the same from any vantage point, above the tip of my wet nose or across the room.

The truth is I’m always already thinking of you when you appear in front of me and it exhausts my humility to admit it’s not a sign but a point on a graph. 

We arrive with surprise on opposite sides of a private hallway. A bus passes a mile away and I disappear into the crowd gathered outside.