The Future of You and I

I won't remember you by tomorrow morning.

A day from now, I won't remember the look on your face when I told you "this is the last time we will ever see each other".

A week from now, I won't remember the scent of your hair after you had freshly showered, or that your favorite kind of cigarettes were Marbalo Red's.

A month from now, I won't remember the touch of your skin; whether it brought me comfort, or burnt me with the haunting reality that I would never be her.

A year from now, I won't remember the color of your eyes. I won't remember the weird thing you could do with your toes. And, I will refuse to remember how you ate pizza for every meal, claiming that the triangular shaped food was, in fact, the complete food pyramid, because it was made of bread, diced with tomatoes, covered in cheese, and spiced with pepperoni.

Ten years from now, I won't regret having paid off my college debt, while you will be sulking around with the heaviest kind; regret. I won't ask around about you, or about how you are miserable with your wife, and about how she doesn't know that you have been laid off because you are scared to tell her. I won't feel guilty about running a steady business that shows up on the cover of a magazine your wife reads, but you never take the time to glance at.

Twenty years from now, I won't have a spouse, kids, or a house - those things, a time ago, you promised we would share. I won't feel bad about how you will have all of those things; smiling on the outside, and broken where it is most important.

Thirty years from now, as painful as it is, I won't act as if did pass each other on the streets, because we will both be too busy to glance up from our cellphones to realize that both of us had time for coffee, and possibly a night out.

Fourty years from now, I won't act as if I did see you staring at a billboard with a published novel of mine plastered across it, and I won't get angry as you don't recognize the pen name. I won't act as if I told you it once, but you were too busy playing charades with girls across the bar to register a word I was saying. This was a week before we broke it off.

Fifty years from now, I won't visit your grave out at sea. I won't read the paper on how you cut life short by suicide, and I won't read how you went off the deep end, after your wife left you and took the three kids you had always wanted, into her custody.

Sixty years from now, I won't sit on that same spot where your body washed ashore and wonder, as the sun sets, how life would have been differently for the both of us if I wouldn't have left you that summer morning.

Seventy years from now, your name will not be the last word to whisper from my lips, but the first of my last sentence, ending in, "I had always loved you".