highschool

#17

before her high school reunion

we were hungry for what was absent
and I think we still are
perhaps even more so

I wonder if they sit straight up out of sleep
(the way I do)
heart pounding head surging with darkness
asking themselves
is this all there is to my life? this, day after day?

it's wrong even to call it "asking" really
the words feel like cellular functions
or a scarcity of photons
being reflected by my ripped open eyes
in waves

that emptiness, that unlit space before the excuses take over,
that was where we lived together
ten years ago

now we are better able to name what awaits us
and that eliminates a certain amount of fear
but in those not-yet-adult days
I never felt myself so utterly possessed by nonverbal dread
of the everyday

what I want to ask them when I see them is
do they too sometimes feel an indescribable loneliness
that could only ever truly be dispelled
by someone lost to the past
(which is to say:
someone utterly lost)

8-8-97

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