Upon seeing him, after not seeing him for months…

The person who used to be my everyday, the one who knew me the most...

I was struck at how the poignant got washed with the mundane.
That though my heart was racing and my entire body shaking,
I asked him about his new hat, he told me about the glasses he just ordered.
I said I was just coming to the coop for a Nugo,
our old language suddenly resurrected, surprisingly intact.
I told him about Quintin the cat voyaging through the neighbors yards.
He said he had been thinking of me, but there was not much more to mention.
The most obvious, present emotion was the last thing that either of us would state.
Instead, I asked him about his chopsticks, his dance-class.
A passerby hearing our conversation might have thought, acquaintances, maybe even strangers.
Unless they saw that my hands were trembling,
and my knees wanting to buckle in when he got up to leave.

It was just a couple of minutes, then suddenly over.

Our time together used to feel so spacious,
like we had all the time in the world to become known to eachother.
And now, after such a brief interaction, not knowing whenever I’ll see him again,
I think back to those lingering days, where the conversation unraveled,
and we shared eachother’s worlds like there would always be more time.
Had we known that it would suddenly be stripped away,
would we still have talked so slowly, or would there have been a more urgent tone,
a feeling to express it all at once?

The last time we hung out, I remember saying
I hate saying goodbye,
almost like a piece of me already knew.
Had I known fully that it was our final goodbye, I might not have actually let go.

There’s a photo from our last time together, before the big rupture.
I’m staring up at the moon, in a long winter coat, though it’s well into spring.
You can see the stiffness in my shoulders.
I remember the stress of my impending move pressing on my shoulders like boulders.
I smile a soft smile, looking up in wonder, as he looks at me to catch the moment.
The picture remains.
One artifact from the night that preceded the day where everything was finally over.
One final proof that we were standing on that bridge together, before it finally crashed to the ground.