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And indeed, there will be time...

There will be time, there will be time.

- from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot

A girl and a boy once roamed the city under sun and starlight. Their portion of the years, once swallowed by the city, are now resurfacing into a single moment. Once upon a time, the girl and the boy drifted into parallels and disappeared into the years. But some sleight of hand, hosts of cogent thoughts, some vagrant wish, a strange, mute sadness--they will never know which, or that even all of these--have driven the years away and pulled, tilted them into a single point.

The girl and the boy are now talking about a shirt. The girl is telling the boy about her dream, because the shirt--and the boy--were in it. They are laughing, and in their laughter, their thoughts are careening backward into another time. The boy is remembering a Thursday, the girl, a Saturday. They were both in those days. As they talk, they are thinking of each other, and they are bending back into each other. Now, they are starting to grope around for the lost years, inching their way into them, picking up the luminous fragments and handling them in a circumspect way, avoiding the cracks on the floor, kicking the shards away. 

In this moment, they are not aware that the wounds have healed, or that they were ever there. They are not thinking about healed wounds; they are not thinking about wounds, at all. They are asking each other about the last movie they saw, about the books they have read. The boy is telling the girl about the book he finished two days ago; about how, upon shutting it, he had found himself wishing he were also shutting her memory forever, because the years have failed to do that. "But here I am," the girl says, and the boy replies, "no you're not here. You're there, I'm here. And I want to be there." The girl hesitates, then laughs, and the boy does, too. They are walking around the gaps.

They start talking about something else.

Axioms

We are parallel lines, an exponential bloom
where Zeno predicted your retreat;


and where I come through a, you come through b
—the two of us watching unyielding axioms


fill the space between us. One geometry says
we will meet, but each time I bend, you bend


toward a point beyond my reach. I want you
to be where I am, or I want to be where you are.


But a single truth has fixed us here,
and you are further for it.


-Barbara Perez