andrea raze i still miss you, and the embers of your hair, and your cat who made my feet his sworn enemies and once improvised the bathtub into a giant litter box, and the way you danced that night when i didn't know what it meant but i knew it meant something, and friday early evenings on your couch, slow swimming in the deep end of your eyes. i've seen two pictures of you in the last seven years, but they're not you anymore. they're pictures of someone else. someone i don't know. i dream about you every year or two. that's where i know you now. 131120 ... raze it came to me, the random way things come back to you sometimes, though it never really left me. the night i drank enough to kill a medium-sized animal and you drank a lot less, but you were the one wobbled by it. i need to lean on you, you said. we walked across town from the bar we defected to, back to the one we started in, and i steadied you, and a passing cop complimented me on being a gentleman. and that's the closest thing to a good experience i've ever had with this city's police force. 151008 ... gja A recently formed habit had me looking for a like button regarding the above anecdote. 151009 ... raze i have so many memories of you. i wish i had more. i hate watching those memories degrade as time chips away at them. i would give anything to have a picture of you. a picture of us walking or talking or just existing in the same space. the only pictures i have live in my mind, and they're not getting any sharper. i wanted to find the note you wrote me when i bought you groceries. i knew i still had it somewhere. i thought it would be in a box in one of the upstairs closets. it wasn't. it was in a box in the basement. a box full of things i didn't have any memory of. things i wrote. things other people wrote for me. things i kept that anyone else would have thrown away. your note was in there. it was nothing like i remembered. seventeen years ago it was a piece of lined paper. it isn't a piece of lined paper anymore. it's water damaged from the flood we had a few years ago. the lines that once hugged your words have all been worn away, but your words are still there. what i remembered was gratitude for groceries. what's really there is something else. what's really there is love. it hurt to read. but i'm so glad i found it. there was something else underneath the note, hidden in the mess of other things. i pulled it out of the box. it was nine pages all about you. all about us. nine pages of things i said, things you said, things i felt, things that happened, things that were and weren't. things i'd forgotten. things time has taken from me. i don't remember writing any of this. in the first paragraph i wrote that i wanted to get these things down before any more of the details started to fade, to guard against_forgetting. so i sent a gift to myself sixteen years in the future. maybe i knew one day i would wish i'd done something like this. i don't think i knew i would forget doing it in the first place, or that i would only dig it up because i was looking for something else. it didn't bring you back. but it gave me more pictures of you, sharp as the day they were made. and it makes me want to cry until my eyes turn to dust and we are nothing but memories in a box in someone else's basement. 210130 ... raze when i see you in dreams, sometimes you're happy to see me, and sometimes you're not. sometimes you're you, and sometimes you're only a thought. last night you were living alone in a small house at the end of a street called grace. and i thought that seemed about right. 210913 what's it to you? who go blather from