Nineteen-year-old-me
wanted to see my future
so I lived another thirty years.
So this is my future. I’ve seen it all.
I want to go back and explain.
In this never-ending time-travel that moves hour by hour
I want to stop right now
and go back
and show the nineteen-year-old-me
and would he say that he would want to live the thirty years standing in front of him, or
give it up?
Like a cemetery ravaged by a grave robber, an alley where all the house lights are dark continues, and the streetlamps hang like the pale-red skirt of a woman who hung herself. That night falling with bare feet, hugging it and crying, that’s what it’s like to be nineteen-year-old-me.
Beginning on that long, long night when I thought about
how instead of English vocabulary, names filled his workbook pages black and he carelessly knocked down his bike and stared at the river-water crashing like tire spokes, thinking water doesn’t flow, it jumps endlessly from high to low.
I only lived but a day, but in that thought thirty years had passed and
you haven’t changed at all.
A friend who died when he was twenty-one appears in my dream.
He’s living out the three years that we knew each other.
And then I wake up and he’s dead again.
The attic I lived in when I was nineteen, if you turn the broken hand on the clock
outside the window is the darkness that falls like the hand that fell from the clock.
Remembering being nineteen is not becoming nineteen
but reliving all the time lived it took to get to be nineteen.
Like the hand of a clock wedged into the darkness
close your eyes. Those who know this story are dead already, so in order to listen to this story you have to die.
On that long, long night
close your ears. In order to tell this story, I have to die and become a person that can never know this story.
On that long, long night
where are you? What are you looking for?
I’m looking for the death of a person who wasn’t born. On a long, long night
a story we all know.
Arriving through sleep and unbearable darkness, as if a dead person’s birthday is passing
one day a memory from thirty years in the future reached the nineteen-year-old-me for reasons unknown.
I lived thirty years, but for you
only a day has passed.
Like the black spring tightly wound inside a clock, the attic
spinning every day the same night spinning.
