ouch

It’s fine until I walk away. Ouch. That feels sad. I don’t know why.
‘Because we care but we’re moving on’ and it sounds like a song, but it’s what you say.
And as I walk away I carry this strange sadness in my palm and look at it without asking why.
Yellow leaves turn under my feet
hair blows around my ears, and I could be walking anywhere.

There’s something in that connection, between two pairs of eyes.
It’s strange when it begins to change.It is stranger
when you realise it will never totally die,
that you can always look back in the same way; with powerful eyes.
I watch my palm.
It quivers- and fractures the present, leaves a gap, a fissure, a dent.
This spider’s web is built on empty spaces.
Across a pocket, that look is suspended: that delicate thread, that once held our eyes together, holds together life, too.
Powerful gaps. Tug on that- and you realise how weak we are.
It shows up this pretty thing in my palm.

That hug where bodies hold, lean on a million repeats;
the same warm pockets of air, never change. Just as long as you let go.
Now and two years ago and probably in another ten.
It hurts that it doesn’t go away, but it’s pretty all the same.
Echoes of the past reverberate in the distance,
and my present is here.
It rests against deep lines in my palm.