At a red light, I was in my car and singing, "The sun shines, leaves blow." The vehicle I pulled up next to was signalling to turn left. In it were a man and woman who I have not spoken to in a very long time. And when I noticed I stopped my car short. I was behind them enough that they could not see me. I wonder now if they would still have recognized me.
Some people are encased with fortune, where they spend their whole lives surrounded by a closeness shared with a few friends or family members or a lover. These are the ones that are cherished against all others they have met, while those others all pass along to gradually fade into the colour of past horizons. There are so many more people, countless ones, that have put their hands into your world, who have affected your days and decisions and your outlook, but whose direct participation in your history, their press upon the way your body shapes, becomes flattened out as you make new skin.
Most often the departures that occur between people are not coincident. The spirit of one still holds or builds while the other walks, perhaps down some path, perhaps in the midst of an enormous garden of trees between the mountains and the sea. Oppositely, maybe you are that figure that no longer occupies the moments of another, a statue landed among statues in the dark of an ocean. And now, you know, you have to learn to know that they do not spend any part of their days with any thought of their part of your history, or your part of theirs. All these figures in piles underwater, and by the time their decay floats upward they are specks without taste in your drink.
The last expression I shared with those two sitting beside me again, though in their own lane now, was a note placed at their door left shortly before dawn. It was a mixed thank you powdered with grievance, and tucked within the return of something borrowed.
They did not see me, I did not ask them to.
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