so it goes

[Split]

"The moment one forms an idea of a thing and successfully catches one of its aspects, one invariably succumbs to the illusion of having caught the whole."

It was the voicemails, I thought, hanging on the tone for closure..
There's the trail- displayed in photos, perfumy clothes' odors.
Park benches, etched hearts. Where it started, lost it in the take over.
Just last week we shared meaning, best intentions, something happened.
Last remaining traces, far stretches, baseless conjectures made way for plans,
The dance of kind gestures, defined better with every day and synapse.

Yet something stays the same.

Lake Winthrop's beaches, sand where faces age, footprints fade in footpaths.
Twelve steps, they say don't look back, but I could say the same-
There's no blame to accept. No nuances to explain away.
But there's a time and a place for everything anyways, so get over it-
Sobered up from many things- hope, her kisses, close company,
Unfocused love for the limits of redundancy. How passive were we...
Seemed seamless. Find contentment for a minute, then just its absence...
A mistake one or the other made, a lesson I shoulda grasped then.
It's all too ephemeral, the ease with which tensions pass,
Fingerprints on glass and smudges of love's opinions of facts-
Past tense is eventual. The fleeting grasp of amnesiacs,
cause time's a state. An emotion to hate, a secondhand clothes rack,
Just borrowing moments- then strangers ask for their moments back--
I catch words we should've spoken drifting slowly past,
but I deserve every verb, adjective, that lacked the right rhyme,
... it wasn't love. Infintessimal mentions on the tongue of life,
Father time? Yeah, you can fuck his wife, purest pleasure,
But then the months rectify the sin in measures of remembrance.
A year went by, relearned independence, a syllable, a sentence,
Single but willing to pretend it was like the summer had no end,
But then, as paths often do- they intersected at our expense.

Her hair's a bit longer, face a little less pretty,
Just the grind of the somber middle-women of pity-
Both in the city now, but she screamed beach weather,
Something still the same, a familiar pressure
I asked her how she was and she said she was doing better,
Then-- I thought what we had was special, or real,
And she said "What was left unsaid? I'd felt all there was to feel.
To be real, I haven't thought about us since October,
Isn't young love something dumb to lose sleep over?"
Something stays the same. A disconnect, what is,
and what I recollect. Just a glimpse. That's all it'd ever been.