mnemosyne

let me lift the veil of memory from your eyes, and--do you recognize me now? say yes, one more time.

It was an impulsive gesture, really, and it should have shaken up the universe that we cocooned ourselves in, safe from the prying eyes of people that look but never see. You were chewing the grape you'd stolen from the fruit section of this supermarket. I was studying your thin wrist, the slight angle at which you leaned over the grocery cart, the lines of your hair--no lax curves this time, Memory scrawled in the waters of my mind. Let me grow old with you (again and again and again) I wanted to shatter the perfect normalcy with words refined by centuries of practice but this knowledge I swore to keep to myself and instead fluttered out: "Let's get married." An institution that we condemned because of its statistical failures was what I offered you, you with slight surprise breaking into the glow of your smile, you who cannot remember (all those lifetimes with bittersweet promises I have spent loving you). And steadily, as if everything in life is a question, you answered yes, caught in that junction between life and death where all breath stops and everything else ceases to matter, yes, our exaltation that echoes always whatever our molecules are, yes--in that bustling grocery store, where the distance between us was made infinite by endings bridged by the sentimental foolishness (happy lovely foolishness) that is love.