only the saying goodbye.
I remember the eighth-grade sullenness
at the way they’d torn up the concrete, put in flowers
to our almost-suburban home.
All undone now, ten years too late.
It was real to me then, I think—
that anger, resistance
to an inevitable shift, unstoppable as the earth itself
Now it is all disappearing, faded
like an old photograph album, only stories
and scents
and the faint taste of dust on my tongue.