I'll learn this time

wip

It’s you, but ancient, pale skin with thin creases, like your face, those expressions, the way your eyes crinkle, have been touched, folded and smoothed back, by hands, too many, which aren’t mine.

Like origami paper, continually forgotten and rediscovered, pressed into a thousand different lives by fingers whose shadows I’ll trail in a future that hasn’t taken form yet. Because it’s not you, not yet.

It’s your mothers’ porch. He stands almost too nonchalant, a rolled cigar, thick and lifeless, held between stubbly fingers that his lips breathe to life. It’s a spark, a burn, slow and radiant, which lights his face in an amber hue.

It’s him, you tell me, and I imagine he has your features, which I trail in my imagination, in the soft string of prismatic colours of my bedroom lights, you retell this, and I follow you, to

to forgotten corners, where history throws its shadow, you lead me, embossed by the feeling, the rhythm of the rise and fall of your words in this half-light.

I follow you,

He’s you, yes, but distorted by the lens of what I imagine two lifetimes before you must have looked like.

He's meeting your dad, and he’s young, your age now. I imagine he has your poise, that seemingly unshaken self-confidence, that charismatic glimmer undampened by the non-acknowledgement of his outstretched hand. Is that where you get it from?

That casual indifference, layered with undertones of humorous dismay, like this was an inside joke he almost had anticipated anyway.

Except my parents, you could never win them over, I say.

I could, you say.

And there it is, that gifted resoluteness, and we play your game, where our pieces, our words, melt into each other, my resistance dissolves, like the sweat dripping from your lips, and I can’t remember which side I was on.

You’re such a romantic, you say.

It reminds me of that cliché, and I want to cringe, I imagine it, my affection, a chain, dangling absent-mindedly from a wrist, getting caught on the end of words, a soft look, a subdued smile.

I try to pry it loose, it breaks.