The Past Come Present

The past comes on hard sometimes.

A face follows you out of your dreams, someone you haven't seen in years, decades. Their features are at once young, as you remember them, and aged too, as you imagine they are now. The sound of their voice has been lost to time, but a hint of their perfume, or the way they moved, or the feel of the deep gravity well of their presence beside you has lingered, though you didn't know it. A thin blade flicks at your heart, drawing a beaded thread of blood.

Do they think of me? You wonder. They must, if you are thinking of them, but you do not know what they feel. Does it cut them, too, when they see me in the eye of their mind? You hope so, yet not to wound, not really, but only to leave a tiny salted slice, something that causes their thoughts to hang. Perhaps they see you through the same blurred, auroral haze of nostalgia and distant loss through which you see them. Perhaps they still know you as you were and imagine you as you never will be.

Perhaps they are looking back at you now in the same long passed memory.

In your car, in the passenger seat as you drive along an empty country road, flood-lamps twinkling at the end of long dirt driveways. In the glow of the Christmas lights that you draped on your front porch, bundled in your jackets. On the hood of your car, the stick of their spit on the bottle of whiskey you shared. On the beach, hair twisting in the wind, eyes hidden behind glasses of black. In the lawn, hot summer heavy on both of you as you gaze up at the cotton-balls in the sky.

What if 'no' had been 'yes'?  What if a frown had been a grin? What if a question had been answered with the truth? You think of these things as the past reaches for you. And though you do not want a different now, you see at once how many possibilities there had been.