In case I forget--

"We don't forget, but something vacant settles in us."

-Roland Barthes

Settling takes time. Some things take hours, others take years. It takes spaces between clocks, distances between days, weeks, months--for situations to unravel, hearts to sink into acceptance, losses to be gathered, thoughts to stabilize, memories to take shape, emptiness to lodge.

In retrospect, what you were to me yesterday, no longer is. Though what you were, in the first place, took a while before it became what it was. And it still, at times, catches me by surprise, what you have become. I'm hard-pressed to use the word "finally", because inserting it anywhere here, while I am in this context, would lend it all a semblance of purpose, as if there was a goal to all of it, in the first place, when there was never any, to begin with. It was a transience of sorts, now that I look at it with clearer sight. It did start out with a thunderclap, yes, but it was one that gradually simmered down into a passage of unnumbered days, stretching out into several, blurry rooftops, nameless except for a haze of conversations, unrecognizable except for a few lines, some weak laughter. A brush here, some strains of music there. A drink, maybe two. Some hushed exchange. There were never any tears; the lines were never drawn that way, the dimming never deep enough.

As far as you and I were concerned, distance was never a question. You were never anywhere, anyway. And now that things have settled into what they have become, I realize this: Neither was I.

There isn't much here to unlearn. We could have been mere shadows passing each other by: noiseless and faint, with neither bruises, nor the possibility of them, to remember each other by.