Who Told You It Was Okay To Show Up Unannounced?
Crushes are funny. Sometimes they shuffled softly to the seat next to yours in a class you took just to pass the time. Weeks crept by and you learned to blush in another language. You became mindful of space, taking care never to lean in too close or your body would give you away — We’re conjugating the future, not building one together.
Months moved along and you closed your books, tucked your pens in your back pockets and waited for the snow to muffle your shared laughter over idioms and hypothetical scenarios at the airport, or at the convenience store, or somewhere far from home. It felt silly, it felt small. It was circumstantial. A spasm. He felt familiar in two languages, and that ease comforted you. You said goodbye and didn’t care enough to look back because it was all just novel and you were just a novice. You passed the class, you passed the time, you never learned past tense.
Crushes are funny. Sometimes they change shape and grow up and ambush you years later in a place you booked a flight to on a whim. The abruptness is startling, the strangeness quixotic. The rain might let up today but only if what you think you remember is true and this is more than an apparition. The pen you pulled from your back pocket stalls, the ink soaks through to tomorrow, you were just looking to pass the time. You’re older now but your faces are the same, and you still lack the vocabulary to talk about the past.
Does your collective failure to use the right words make something more or less sincere than what it is, or might be? Do you believe the past can converge with the present, and does that terrify you? Talk to me. Study me.
You meander in the present, you make plans, you talk about what little history you had in common and gradually make room for rhythmic syllables that, when strung together, form the language of simultaneity. The romance of it is all but lost. The movement is almost native.
How does it feel to be beside each other, out of context and out of time?
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