Q

We remember each other in gists and fragments.

Years later the 4 by 6 glossy you’ve kept is nothing. She is looking at a separate you and has a smile you don’t recognize. You scratch thoughtlessly along the edge where a date (of what?) was scribbled. Her blue-black ink, immutable from time and travel, doesn’t smear.

Instead it comes back to you in the most heedless moments: autumn in the subway, your own face flickering back at you like a broken picture-film. There in a panic is her: above, the clink of gold against teeth; a slide of citrus sealing in feinted sleep, your own laughter filtered in a cloud of hair without subtitles.

You let it rumble through you – freight train of years past – and surfacing, find yourself the same person as before.