If Somewhere, You Remember Me

I did not meet you.
I recognised you.

As the sea recognises the moon
without ever having touched it,
as the earth remembers the rain
long before the first drop falls.

You came into my life
like a summer that had mistaken its season,
with all its warmth,
all its hunger,
and the terrible promise
of things too beautiful to remain.

How fiercely we loved,
how foolishly we believed
that something burning so brightly
could not possibly become ash.

But even the sun must surrender to evening.

And you were gone.

Now there are days
when I have almost forgotten
the sound of your laughter,
the country of your skin,
the thousand little eternities
we buried in a handful of hours.

Yet something of you remains.

Not in my hands,
nor in the empty places beside me,
but somewhere deeper,
where the heart keeps its oldest wounds
and calls them beautiful.

And I wonder, my distant one,
when the night leans against your window,
when the wind moves softly through your hair,
when the world has finished asking
everything it demands of you,

do you remember me?

Does my name rise in you
like a tide without an ocean?
Do you sometimes feel a sorrow
you cannot explain,
a longing without a face,
a warmth beneath your ribs
that no other fire can give?

For I have heard it said
that certain souls are born of one flame,
that distance may divide their bodies
but cannot teach their hearts
the art of forgetting.

And perhaps this is why
I sometimes wake before the dawn
with the strange certainty
that somewhere,
beneath another window,
you have been dreaming of me.

Or perhaps I am only a man
who has mistaken his longing
for the voice of the universe.

Still, if the stars should ever ask you
why your heart grows heavy
on an otherwise ordinary night,

tell them nothing.

Let it be our secret.

For I have loved you in your absence
longer than I ever held you in my arms.

And if, in all the years to come,
you never once remember me,
then let this be the sorrow
I carry to my grave:

that we were made of the same fire,
yet I alone
was left to burn.

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