The last two or three days, they’ve been different. I guess when you left I didn’t think much of it. I guess I didn’t really care. I’ve grown so tired of you. Waking up with you still around, each day. Quietly giving me that look. And when you left, I was ready. A lot’s changed in the last twelve months. We’ve both been dealing with some heavy stuff. I began to think of the future and naturally despised you.
It’s funny, despite a famous memory, I can’t remember the moment you entered my life. Was I watching the ball drop with my parents? Was I sleeping past it, pining for a New Year’s kiss? Oh now I remember. Of course I remember. I was in Lawrence. That was a hard night.
And honestly, I’m not even sure when you left. Here I was in San Francisco, polishing a glass dry in an empty apartment. I dropped the glass, and strangely, didn’t try to catch it. It bounced hard and spun fast in the air without a crack. I watched it with slow eyes and hands to my side, calm and soggy. Some woman’s glass was about to shatter. And when it finally did, half a second later, I looked up and saw the time. You had been a part of the eternal growing past for roughly one-hundred and twenty seconds. And at the instant you left, God even wonders what I may have been thinking. My mind tinkered around a dozen different subjects as I washed those vodka soaked glasses. The moment you left for good I may have been wondering where the Sugar Bowl would be played this year, or asking my previous self how on earth I ended up in an empty apartment in northern California doing someone else’s dishes. While girls everywhere danced or worse, and revelers passed out dirty kisses. Only twelve months after I couldn’t get out of Kansas.
Or maybe I wasn’t thinking at all. Maybe for the strangest Gregorian reasons the glass spun inches above the hardwood for a hearty hundred-twenty seconds. My placid eyes just watching, my mind rushing through a torrent of slow and simple thoughts. The kitchen surfaces rang with a pretty noise, and before I saw a million different pieces, maybe I was scared of the many futures. The way the years just keep slipping and arriving, always being someone I never imagined.
You were both tender and cruel. Passionate and distant, all at once. I suppose you’re all that way, you mysterious years. I know there is nothing to be afraid of. But I wish you’d come back, and I wish you’d bring the others.