I sat letting my mind wander aimlessly when suddenly I found myself reminiscing about the us that’s gone now.  I’m sure the smile on my face betrayed all the pleasant memories that only we two share.  No more than a few brief moments of time passed, yet I relived the life we had and the life we never knew.

Seeing those familiar places and hearing the voices from so long ago — and even feeling your skin brush against mine — made me realize that it’s all too late in coming.  It was silly of me to wait so long, I know, and I even suspect you never knew, but there were always things I meant to say to you.  What’s terribly funny is that I even remember things I wanted to say when we were old.

I know how weird that sounds.  It’s odd seeing it written here.  Still, it’s true.  They were little things I thought would come later, big things I assumed we’d share over the course of years, and bits of living I imagined we’d have plenty of time to talk about.

Our love was so overwhelming back then, though, and I just couldn’t tell you what was on my mind.  It seemed too premature, too young, just as we were.  I didn’t think those ideas could live in that world, at least not then.  In hindsight, perhaps I should have said something anyway.  Unfulfilled thoughts are just empty promises we make to ourselves.  Yet even now I think we were too fragile then.  Lost to me in the flurry of each other, I’m not sure I wanted to interrupt the then with trivial talk about the later, and that’s a regret I have to live with.  I’m living with it now.

Remember sitting in the greasy spoon with half-eaten meals pushed aside so we could draw the plans for our first house?  We didn’t have any paper, so we used those tissue-thin napkins that kept tearing.  The waitress finally offered to find some real paper when she realized what we were doing.  We shooed her away with frantic gestures.  The dream home just couldn’t wait.  Napkins would be just fine.

We were so busy, weren’t we?  Stumbling over each other in all the right ways is how we spent our time, and we loved it.  We were too busy then, busy imagining the life we would never have, considering names for the children who would have your complexion and my stature that would never be born, planning the holiday trips to your family or mine that we’d never take, and enjoying the fantasy vacations around the globe that would never happen.  We imagined ourselves on cruises that existed only in dreams; we saw our future selves living in the comfortable home we’d drawn on transient napkins with specks of grease and ketchup on them; we talked of holiday parties with our closest friends that would never be celebrated.

It was so wonderful to be lost that way, especially with you — or is it because of you?  We were so out of control and happily oblivious.  All our conversations were terribly important even when they weren’t.  We were a good bad together; that much we always had.  We just did all the right things in all the wrong ways.  We made the best mistakes.

I still wonder, perhaps more often than I should, what might have been between us.  And that leads me back to sitting here thinking about it all, especially the things I always thought I’d say later.  I really meant to say them.  Now, they’ll forever be silent.

[circa 1991]