I flinch
because suddenly you are in my mind.
I hear some dumb song I think you liked
and it triggers this memory of
you, playing guitar and singing to me
outside a closed-down movie theater
on a warm spring night.
I sat on the asphalt as you sat on the trunk of your car
and as I watched you, backlit by the half-moon
in the clear starry sky,
I thought there could be no sweeter sound
than your voice coating James Taylor’s words.
How could I have known how we would turn out,
and that that same song years later would first
double me over, sick to my stomach, drunk on sorrow-
each note like a knife wound in the back,
James’ betrayal as I tried to escape you?
How could I have known that in time it would simply make me cry
or silently mourn,
hanging my head in the cereal aisle of the grocery, as it played on,
fueling my regrets?
And now, I think I feel a sting
when it plays in the background in a restaurant
as I dine with my new lover.
This memory is called back up from its grave
and for a moment it is a mosquito on my arm,
a brief concern, tiny sucking of my blood,
and then it leaves.
Back then you were everything, but,
in the end, you only make me flinch.
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