Never Will We Ever

In the end, the experiences we had together, and the memories that then formed, those didn’t matter. Instead, it was the absence of memory that defined our togetherness, the things we never did together: we never kissed in the rain; we tried once, but it was only drizzling. We never spent the night together as teenagers, there never came a weekend when parents went out of town. We never had dancing lessons or took a summer art class together.

Those gaps in memory are what give birth to loneliness, when all you can remember are all the things you did not do, things you only read in books or saw in movies, superimposing your faces onto perfectly framed bodies.

That is love, when you only wish you had done more. It’s almost as though you feel you are forgetting something, you are forgetting that there is nothing to forget. It is something the opposite of amnesia. We are all scrambling to recover memories of lives we never led.

The list goes on: we never made love in a hotel in South Carolina. We never visited the Smithsonian. We never held hands and watched fireworks on the Fourth of July.

We never, we never, we never