and it goes by and it goes by and it goes by until it doesn't

And weeks go by and I picture a woman I have never met in person playing in the sun somewhere I have never known. She is funny and smart and what might have been. She must be happy because she is not around much any more, around me on the circuits and wires, and I am happy for her but sad for myself because I am selfish and my ego is out of control and I miss her, what so very little I held of her. She is feathering a nest, readying for a life she has never had but always wanted (secretly). The good stuff: video games and picnics at the beach and a future and maybe there is a white dress and a cake and all the tingly four-letter words. The things she was deprived of when she was a child. The things that seemed impossible to her as an adult. She should have those nice things, she deserves them. She should make them last for as long as she can, and it is hard hard work, so hard. I hope she can hold on to it. I could not.

And years go by and I see photos of the one I could not, another woman from long ago, a her I knew as well as you can know a her. In person, too. We touched in every way. We told lies like "forever." Photos on the circuits and wires of her in a long white dress cutting a cake and she is smiling in every photo, of course -- and also in the photos of her doing things not in a long white dress, cake or no cake, smiling a bright white smile, and it is wonderful that people can be so happy without me. She seems to be the same person she always was, when her head was in my lap, my hand stroking her hair, and this is all wonderful. It is wonderful to be small, our proper size in other lives. It is wonderful to be a memory inside of her that becomes less and less a memory as details fade into a vague feeling that marks a place and time that is gone. The feeling is all that lingers. We could not live if we remembered all the crimes of others and, worse, our own.

So it is there, in the far corner of the skull, and the only way to touch it is to close your eyes and reach through the black, feel for it, feel what it was for another to take you as you are and forgive you for it for a moment.


~O~