That you saw me
You were a track star
when I was beginning to dress awkward
and withdraw from my peers,
tired of answering where I was from or why I moved.
Your friends never understood
why you weren’t happy with what you had
or how you were different from them while looking the same.
Three hours away
I was hanging half a magazine on my bedroom wall
and starting to live in my head like another dimension
where I was more like you or this girl
I had a crush on in the homecoming court.
Back in your borough,
You didn’t feel a sense of belonging
where all the girls had the same long dark hair
and black rimmed glasses.
While they gushed over Guido’s
you scribbled rock mantra’s on the sides of dictionary’s
and dreamed of crossing the NYC bridge
like another world that symbolized freedom and enabled diversity.
Back in my bedroom I used a dictionary to index my feelings
and write terrible poems.
So excited by words, I sacrificed comprehension
for potential rhyme schemes
and stole song lyrics to fill in the blanks.
You doodled through classes and wrote in a journal
but never considered yourself a writer or an artist.
You said goodbye to your family and mostly fake friends
days after graduation and drove to Albany for college.
You moved in with a boy long before I first kissed one,
wondering what I was supposed to feel
besides blank and disappointed.
You spent five years with him
while I realized I wasn’t meant to conform
and that kissing could be wonderful, with a woman.
I made some friends I could be myself around
while you finished college and left the boy too foolish
to be faithful.
You kissed your best friend one night
after getting drunk, then slept with another
you would never say was your type
but made an exception because she was so gentle
and knew something about you
before you could have known yourself.
I began an affair with a woman
nine years too old and three years too late for it to have a real chance.
She was being abused and I wanted to save her
like a capable adult despite still being a minor.
So instead I slashed her girlfriend’s tires
and made love to her in my first apartment
until she wrote me off as a child but with more grown up words.
I started drinking cheap liquor
while you met a blonde in a bar
who called you beautiful in a passed note
as though she were thirteen instead of thirty.
You were so flattered because to you,
she was the epitome of the word written.
The friend that opened your eyes to this world, disapproved
but you were beyond reproach.
I quit my first job to work in a bigger store
while you took on part time hours
behind a courtesy desk
to pay for gas and school books.
She didn’t want you to work
and felt intimidated by your education
because she didn’t have much.
She failed to understand the time you spent
at the library studying
or how much work grad school was
because she wanted to be more important.
You spent half your days reading for lecture
while I spent a quarter of mine
waiting at four or six bus stops reading for pleasure.
You went home to another argument
or stayed out late as possible,
pushing confrontation to the morning
like some terrible meeting that would ruin the day
as opposed to another evening.
I stayed up some nights to spite my early, room for nothing schedule
as though free time could be thieved
when really, I was only stealing from sleep
and would fail a test or miss a bus for thinking different.
I wrote a letter to my older woman, begging her to come back
from a person or a place she never left
while you cried yourself to sleep and contemplated
running away from yours,
but without financial means or any viable location in mind,
you stayed.
I started skipping classes my last year, waiting for the last day
the way you must have before breaking out of your hometown
in front of all those girls that acted surprised
while knowing that you weren’t coming back.
I must have been in at least ten schools
before ending up in this tight knit community
where all twenty of my classmates
had been introduced to each other in diapers
and never went more than a day without speaking.
I was accustomed enough
to the outside of circles by then, of course,
but that didn’t mean it was something I enjoyed.
To them, you were such a foreigner
with your bronze skin and Staten Island dialect.
They made fun of you the way they made fun of me
until something new moved into their mouths.
Their unilateral world was not like ours.
They lived in another mindset, one that did not process opposites,
seeing even but never odds.
In the only world I know,
you are the most exquisite thing I have ever seen in person
and I am not the only one with eyes.
You know this now.
You have been told and chased and praised.
You issue numbers and keep a list of people waiting.
Back in my time, you did not believe so much,
until I wrote and wrote and went so mad with love
until it so clearly could not have been anything else,
even though that would have made it easier for you to leave.
That we ended up in the same place,
in that building, in the middle of two cities,
both if us could have so easily missed…
What are the odds if not staggering, when you
stop to consider our lives?
You were so far out of my league and still are.
That you saw me
should have been impossible.
That I got so close to your heart
and then lost, will never be forgotten.
For you, I was just a moment, a passing tide
or warm sanctuary that could have just as easily
been in the next town.
For me, you were it, not “the one that got away”
but the one, period.
And that you saw me
was the only thing that ever really happened.
