and it was all good things

i remember when we were fourteen

and i said you couldn’t dance for shit

because your laces were untied, and you tripped

over them again and again,

your smile a lighthouse, and i said

god, i hope this lasts forever, otherwise

i don’t know if there’s much to look

forward to in twenty years

–

i remember when we crushed the

heads of dandelions in between the

asphalt and the blue marbles that my

brother found discarded in the alley

behind my house, milky dandelion stems

and the smell of dogs

outside of the elementary school

when the sprinklers were all turned on

–

i remember when i was only eleven

and you told me to take a leap of faith

into piles of leaves which stank

of hennessy and mildew

and of newborn autumn — leap in!

like it was a tank of citric acid

and i was a photograph

not yet developed

–

Except I don’t remember any of that,

because none of it ever happened, mind you.

It’s just a bunch of words which conjure

some kind of empty, formless nostalgia,

some churning in the mindless depths for

a life everyone wishes they had, so we can

look back at our alleyways and our elementary schools

and think it was all good things.

–

You don’t event exist.

I don’t know who you are.

We never crushed dandelion heads together.

We never danced at fourteen, partially because
at the time I was too afraid to ask you,
but that’s all just the backstory of an imaginary beast.
There are no words that can change the truth:
you’re the face I can only see with my eyes shut tight —
–