“When we were children, you didn’t care for words, you only filled pages with wide vertical lines. We lived in the city and I thought you drew lampposts, telephone lines, the long, rusty rods scattered in construction sites. Your voice insisting, no,
no these are trees.
I fall into a puddle on my way to catch a bus, and unlike a dog, I can’t sit around and lick my wounds, I have to walk away like nothing has happened. Let me watch the blind men by the terminal massage commuters for a fee, let me listen to karaoke music and stare at stall selling cheap umbrellas, let me stand under the shadow of a lamppost as is my habit, though it is evening, the weather is cool, and you are gone. If I keep still enough inside this shadow, it is as if I am not here.
If I keep still enough, there is no proof you are not here with me.”
(some stitched-on lines from one of my favorite poems: Disappear by Conchinita Cruz)
