Every relationship is a continuous span of time,
A flow of contour lines,
But you only remember the highs and the lows.
That's how you define that relationship
In retrospect: by how euphoric you were
The first few weeks,
And how utterly despondent at the close.
And the spaces in between? Gone.
Gone almost as fast as they happen,
Words vanishing into the ether,
The mundane become the banal, and then non-existent.
I'm talking of memory, of course.
But sometimes traces are left:
A gift from a forgotten benefactor whose identity, when recalled,
Hits hard;
A text message (or worse,
Ten), the meaning rendered indecipherable out of context,
A faint echo of a forgotten tangent
On that fading contour line;
A scene (was it a dream? from a movie?) that holds your mind hostage
In the shower, on the metro, before falling asleep,
That seems vaguely familiar, as if,
As if you acted it out in a play,
Or it happened in a previous lifetime,
Or to someone else bearing your name and hers, or maybe
It's just a recurring daydream . . .
. . . and you wonder . . . .