A decade leaves

your stomach places.

Those old words and whorls and tendrils

feel distorted, heat-warped

by distance

and what stitches

a hollow in you to threads is

a person you loved

or thought you could

love.

If you could go

again to that timeline a

soul would

outbalance everything

all combined,

and you know

she isn't

who you

ought to feel any

particular way

about fourteen years later.

But you do.

Will you lie for

your

sense

of normalcy?

It is gone,

normalcy, with the

time it might have cost

anyone anything.

It is not a question who

you should now

feel butterflies

about even

though it cannot count.

The question is how

to understand the non-

existence of that time

and the loveliness,

hers, her shyness.