You wont see her
You wont see her. You have old remembrances that wash out from her feet into the spot she lays. They have faces and requests, distant eyes behind windows, distant bodies over the horizon living different lives. Thoughts, from moments ago perhaps, when she stood on the carpet with her skirt over your feet, with face in the dim, weathered away, hard from regretting you, are hidden in plaster envelopes and dropped into the path of wind driven sand. You wont see her because you dont want her. Seeing her like that makes her yours, indelibly. What could you do with that thread of a life. You are looking at her feet. Her toes are purple, downturned, born, worked, and retired. You are not the mirror at the end of it. You didnt organize the city so that you could come upon this image, but you would. The scenario is old, but you didnt feel the burden until it actually arrived. The moments that you knew to be prefigured, the set aside images that interlock with the plats that your story left empty, where bare floors run with fluid from beneath doors, leaden clouds ride dawn breezes, a half curved smile and pleading hands are the conspicuous evidence that you have caused something. You lost your life from old thought that a day and a night would fill the empty space that no past and no future leave, all the empty plats that one day and one night could fill. But it was only a thought and you never acted. If you are now seeing something, her stretched into nothing behind the door, if you leave her dried out next to the bath, where you found her in that thought, you pick up her shoes, if you put them on, pull the curtain, look out the window into the night and walk out the door, then it is visible, already thrown across the midnight from the bathroom mirror and into the alley, and it has happened and is over, before you even realized that what you had been waiting for was that lost moment, your first conception, when you swung your arms out of the darkness and took a step forward. Now there is nothing left, but you have a new pair of shoes.