A little Gray Building
91
I can remember the day I realized that I was not the main character of my story,
can remember the day you packed your memories into moving boxes
stripping your house bare of the tales swapped under its roof
and our stories,
which had intersected for a while,
for so long that they seemed to be one,
poured onto different pages.
I tried to find you in the table of contents
but you were in a different book now, and your story
no longer shone in black ink on a bone-white page
for me to read.
I can remember the day I realized that I might not be a character in your story
anymore, that I might be a footnote
or a faceless name mentioned once and forgotten,
that I may have thought that it was our story, but
yours was too much to be contained in my pages.
I don’t know what direction your story has taken,
and I wouldn’t recognize it if I--
somehow, in a world less cold and uncharted--
found it again,
at a library that time doesn’t know by name,
at a bookstore, reading over a stranger’s shoulder.
Your story is no longer mine to read.
I can remember the day I tried to go back a few chapters,
to laugh over a joke that only we understood
to dance through the world, drunk on foolish courage
to sing my part in this beautiful duet.
But the song was a solo now, soft and mournful,
I’d forgotten the steps to the dance,
and my laughs sounded too much like crying.
I don’t know what paths your story has taken,
what roads crafted from paper and ink
lie before you, what
the flow of your poetry sounds like to
my battered ears,
but I do know this:
if ever I come across your novel
in a bookstore, reading over the shoulder of a friend I haven’t met yet
in a library that time waltzed with but never touched
in this world, so cold and uncharted
and yet filled with so much light;
if ever I have the luck to
read your story,
I’ll write a sentence or two, changing our ending into your beginning.
Until that day,
I will write
rivers, cities, worlds. I will write
my story, the story that began when we first became islands to each other,
a story that you may read someday
or that you may not; I will write
paths before me, and if there are none
I will write them into existence
and when my tears
mix with ink,
I will dip my quill into the river streaking its way across the page
and continue my story.