Washed Up

I am interested in how my entire person can be taken to another time and place in a single instant. How I can be walking to class in the freezing morning of Idaho along a river, and close my eyes, and be suddenly in your car. I didn’t even know I carried with me the feeling of you. I didn’t know that somewhere in these pages was a conversation on a cold morning and how it felt to drive to school high and tired. 

If I try to imagine the different ways I’ve been loved or been a lover, it looks like cabinets inside my ribcage. And it’s not just you I keep inside there. It’s full of artifacts and relics and views out the window, and apparently instances/ ways of being that can completely wash over me on my way to class. 

This is one of those times where language fails me. Any words, no matter how specific, that I try to attach to that sensation, they fall miles and decades short of anything that might be accurate. I’d like to say it was because it was cold, or the sweet smell of my breath, or that I was tired. Maybe because I closed my eyes and for a second my body forgot when and where we were, with you in that car might have been physically the closest moment I’d had to this one.

I’m sure we could trace all sorts of lines to the ways in which we come and go from one another, but I’m not interested in making sense of any of this. I am only interested in allowing, it or you or whatever this, to wash over me and bring with it the memory in so visceral a form it startles me and speaks of who I’ve been before this.