Spirited

It was something cheap – whatever we could get a friend of a friend’s brother to buy us, something horribly fiery and wan and capable of just the right amount of delirium; I had never noticed you, I mean, I had, of course, but only as some ancillary character – and now we’re left the room and time spins out and around us and your mouth is on mine, and I cannot believe I’d never noticed you.

We wouldn’t last, of course -- we weren’t ever really sure we were even we, and not just you and I and some stolen hours, some stolen days, some stolen…weeks? And well, wait…in a moment we both realized that we were either completely mistaken or audaciously one another’s future.

As it were, the summer took us a thousand miles in opposite directions, and we came to our senses or our circumstances or just the loose disjointment of time when you are barely nineteen and so not really capable of the adequate navigation that any sort of real commitment requires…

I never saw you again, but I heard you were happy, and that was fine. I don’t know if you ever heard of me or sought to find out after that – it’s not really important, except to say that you were, to me, and at a time when I discovered I needed you far more than I ever could have guessed.

There are times now when I lift a glass – these days of something far better, and yet somehow stripped of the magic of those nights – and remember the sweet shock of your ethanol tongue, the warmth of your bare skin suddenly against mine, the taste of your sweat in my mouth, the fleeting, foolish belief in our possibility, and I am thankful for the hours we forgot to mark or number when everything was scattered crazily before us into a handful of dawns we will of course never return to.