With you I will always be living in the past. Not just in the innocent days where I freely fell into all of you and I, but even in the now, as I wait until the next time our chained up time will let us see each other. Locked up in another small heartbeat, I know our lives are forever changed. But goddammit I wish you would tell me what’s happening now. Instead I will wait tortured by silence, knowing you are suffering through the hells of our own denial and all the places and people it led to. This routine will last until the pain is over and you can speak freely, and only be shared in the large square footage of a calendar space between our last moment together.

Until that I just have to hold onto the memory of us wet and laughing from the last measured space in the calendar. We will rarely see each other, and when we do it’s a snarl of magic and mistakes, lost words, and secret smiles, knowing beneath the surface that the sun is shining somewhere on us. But goddammit I wish you would tell me what’s happening. Now. 

I’ve been thinking about our hands. The slight way they grace across surfaces to taste our feelings about copper, the grooves of the metal eraser top pencil, or the ruffled soft threads of a blanket. Hot summer sidewalk underneath our feet, shuffling bits of dirt from the construction that snaked across University Ave ours touched. The familiar pull to push them together with our combined forces illusive in the sun. Shift, shuffle sidewalk. Grit, across rocks, chunked up. Instead our pinkies brushed and pulled together. 

“I promise.”

“Do you swear?”

“Pinky Swear”

Solemn small hearts, lipped little words, from loving little mouths. Children’s games. Rushed into a space. I thought of all those sweet nectar days, and important honor upon secrets kept, whispered under the shimmery shifting veil of leaves and rays of sunshine found in the seclusion beneath a tree. 

We swung our pinkies like that for awhile, walking back to our bikes. They were waiting expectantly against the curved metal, for us to take them home.