Nostalgia is slippery like a water snake. One deliberate squeeze and there it went.
Exit upon exit if you look at it. Look away, and beware it's return.
A mower hums somewhere beyond the houses, a duet of humming and bass, moving through the air because afternoons have always sounded this way.
A whisper of perfume passes— familiar, specific— caught for a second in the space between two steps.
A child runs ahead, hair lifting and falling across her forehead, light moving with it, time carried in the motion like once before with a different name.
The body looks at its wrist. What time is it— noon or 1987?
A recognition without language, already underway.
Memory follows in pieces.
You reach toward it— toward the full arrangement, the exact alignment of what it felt like to stand there.
Who you were. Who they were. Where, again? And, why?
Then without warning it arrives.
Complete. Immediate. Undivided.
Distance closes. The past takes its place inside the present, fully formed, in at least two of your senses.
Iris Lennox 