Strangers

Anyone you know can be a stranger,

Including those strangers who were actually people

You used to know. It’s so dangerous, just making

Attachments to people, you then start calling ‘lovers’.

Their loss. I fold up paper to make it heavy,

Giving words and mixed emotions some gravitas

‘Cause it probably looks different being thrashed

Around in the wind than with your confession scrawled on it,

But who cares what it said anyway? I hope you get a like,

A flicker of a future in someone's eye, then you’re just a category

Like everyone else. A relationship status.

.

How inconceivable that those past people

Might have left the seat warm just before you arrived,

Or brushed your arm, unaware, in the supermarket aisle.

It’s totally unfathomable that you should have ended up

With your shoes, next to mine, next to the door,

In an apartment that was never meant to be yours, but

I suppose second chances aren’t always tainted with regret.

Yet, I still can’t let go of a broken heart, I even

Had it tattooed on my arm… but excuse me. I’ve lost my

Train of thought. Lost the contours of your face, I didn’t

Trace them with my finger long enough to remember.

I’m just always imagining the finishing slap of rejection, a laptop

Face slammed shut and devotion approaching a full stop.

.

But that’s not the story. Just a before and an after, stalked by

Could-have-been’s and not-at-all’s. My shadow, an epitaph for

That other road you almost forced me down,

And for all the unmet strangers whom I never shared a kiss,

A cold shoulder, a cheap round. Just a memory of some other life not lived and

A course shifting, and shifted. Who knows if it’s just luck or chance

Or a blip in your process that made you decide ‘this could be it’,

The bite that stopped you from turning your back, tossing and turning in bed.

And now everything else is just as unknown, all the others left in

Your wake, and I am becoming a stranger to a person no longer here.

Just spittle and bone, a shadow of self. Absent, bereft.