Bliss

-I sit, the cold wind, uncomforting me, and you, shivering. The words carried away, we’re left in silence with nothing but gestures and stares. You half smile, as if trying to salvage something that’s already been lost. I can’t smile back, not even faintly, and it hurts. I know that’s all you want, a reply. To know that like you, I will dig deeper, even if in vain for a finite ephemeral moment of bliss, but I know it’s not there. It goes, with the long passages of time that disappear before me and suddenly I realize I’ve gotten older and all I’ve wrought from time are the markers, the gray hair, the receding hairline and wrinkles that begin their burrowing into my, still young, skin. In this ephemeral moment, like the many that have come before, there are, the strands of possibility, that with the unlacing of the moment, are washed away by the past and all that remains is the memory of what could have been and the awareness of what never was.
Even as we sit, the wind stops, the streets are emptied of cars, people disappear from our background and the lattes lose their flavor, your eyes refuse to blink and the same washing of time and of memory comes over me and I realize that I’ve missed yet another could’ve been. And I lay there on the broken sheets of night, my pillow refusing to forget your scent and I close my eyes and lose myself in the memories of pasts that never were and lose, yet another possibility of now.