pardon me.
We said goodbye to the hosts,
they never begged us to stay.
We didn’t belong, really.
And we began our walk home,
to our part of town.
“What you up to tomorrow?” you said.
“You mean later today?” I said.
And then we talked some more.
About plants that needed watering
and wild animals that had been tamed
for no good reason.
And how they’ll be dead soon, anyway.
You mentioned laws of nature and I cracked a joke.
You laughed.
I’d never thought I could make you laugh.
Then we both wondered if we were, perhaps,
seeing things into that oncoming dawn
that weren’t there at all.
“Let’s go for a walk,” I said. I was excited, all of a sudden.
“But we are walking,” you said, and you were right.
We were walking, indeed. I just didn’t notice.
N.B.
(Whether due to our extreme, unreasonable and unjustified closeness, a genuine error in calculating our trajectory, other people’s unsolicited opinions, mis-interpreted premises of reasoning, a chemical imbalance in the brain — yours or mine, too much talking or none at all — — I don’t think we’ll ever know the trigger for sure,
the fact remains:
just a couple of blocks short of us reaching home, as some people appeared in the street, a rowdy bunch, seemingly out of nowhere. People. Like —you know — ‘people,’
the two of us — WE SPLIT.
Immediately.)
Did you ever make it home?
