You might as well befriend the moon— embrace her clouded peekaboos. And music…
Receive the tune— no time to choose— alone in a crowd or no one in view. And a smell…
Wafts past your nose— what was that? Or who?
Perfume on skin or a place that you knew.
Pause.
No need to wonder— you know who that was— and who you are as nostalgia winds the second hand round.
“Time is a straight line,” said he. “It moves consecutively, watches as it goes behind and below, like walking a path that winds into— well— no one knows.”
“No one knows, that’s right,” said she. “Simply put, I do agree. But there’s no line to speak of. Time bends—not like a knee— more like a finger touching its thumb or a rainbow finding its spherical end and answering with a gentle, Come.”
Time returns to the places we’ve been.
One says, “That memory is far.” Another, “The moment is here.”
Yesterday can be set down, but the nows of that day rise from the ground without notice or sound—
to delight or confound— it depends on the seconds into which they were bound.
Moments become recollections. Recollections, seeds with a life of their own.
Promises and hope, gentleness and rage, a touch, a glance, a well-appointed room or a half-written page—
all sown into skin, finding rest in smiles and tears, repose and toil, love and loss, freedom and cost, and the way sunlight lay across the earth at the end or when it all began.
“That was back then,” said he. “That is today,” said she.
The minutes listened.
“There is wisdom in both.”
Time smiled— crouched, quiet— behind an autumn tree, waiting for the final leaf to fall.
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 