We met in the wrong season –
you, still untangling yourself from another life,
me, half-packed for a city I’d promised myself to.
The timing arrived like a letter addressed wrong,
slipped beneath the door of people
we were no longer becoming.
I knew it in the way your laugh
landed in my chest and stayed there.
How your hand, brushing mine for the car keys,
became an entire conversation
neither of us knew how to begin.
But recognition isn’t permission.
And wanting isn’t having.
Some nights I wonder about the parallel world
where we arrived at each other unencumbered –
no half-finished chapters,
no tickets already booked,
no promises made to other versions of ourselves.
Would we have been gentler then?
Or was it precisely the impossibility
that made us pay attention,
that turned ordinary moments
into things we’d later hoard like photographs?
Perhaps we were always
the museum behind glass –
beautiful, untouchable,
preserved in the amber of almost.
I think I believe this:
that right people don’t wait for right times.
They build them, or break them, or damn the cost.
What we had was something else –
exquisite and insufficient,
a theory of love never tested by the mess of living it.
Still, on certain afternoons when light falls
the way it did that autumn,
I taste the shape of what we didn’t choose,
and it’s both relief and grief,
both doors closing and opening,
both the lesson and the loss.
Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.
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