parallel lines - who meet

walking down the unlit path towards that glowing above ground car garage, illuminating a very familiar silhouette, I knew I was being reunited with an unexpected friend. I had spent a large amount of time as a youngling at this park; playing on the very same flying fox that I watched my friend Aubrey play on now, lifting their feet up as to not drag along the woodchips below. I reached out to touch the handle, clenching my fist around it until my knuckles were white, then brought my fingers up to my nose. that cold metallic smell. i gently sat myself down on one of the surrounding benches, listening to the sounds of my friends shuffling closer and their distant conversation. one of my friends sits next to me, puts an arm around me. my father used to sit here and watch me play on the swings, i told him.

perhaps the body doesn’t quite know what to do with the knowledge of time. time changes things, it rusts and mutates, it leaves behind a lack, then it strengthens and maintains, it burns constants into our lives - and forlorn creature i am, finding myself in the same places and playing patterns with doppelgängers, running rampant and talking about the same handful of things. its like we move forward through time but always at the same pace, so that i still might look over and see you, and to my eye you are the same person i’ve always known. our tectonic plates colliding and pushing away again, like magnets that can only admire each other from afar. but i cannot touch the memories even when they stay, even when the years do not gnaw at them, do not fundamentally make them a complete fiction. do i really want to? that night my friends took turns pushing me on the swing, and it was enough, and you were there.