The soundtrack bubbles against a crush of bodies. Recorded piano glides between legs and sashays around hips; the silent clip of hard soles against harder concrete outside this microcosm on wires. We are all bound to this route. Lurching to predestined stops. Except when our our minds are overwhelmed with everything we’ve accepted. And we change the sign to flash SORRY, FULL. But not soon enough. Each thought grazes the knees of another, pressed thigh to thigh and arm to arm. Careful never to make eye contact, except in the briefest moments when your eyes make sense to mine.

These memories wander long. Time as convoluted as a cerebral cortex. Months still shiny under all the dust. Polished too smooth from too much tumbling. Does she remember who I turned out to be?

“There ain’t no dress rehearsal,” he says. My ankles twitch against atrophy. Events tumble into avalanche and all my fears are buried. Nothing waits. I can be within or without. These are the doors: one, two, three. We always want door number four.

So when I say I would never, I don’t ever, the smug horror is evident. The mirror of language distorts my waist wide and my face tall. The hypocrisy is both conscionable and inevitable. This silence, within which I bide and abide, is a form of delusion. I wait for my turn to speak, knowing I will never hear above the bluster of voice curving across the continents.

The problem is that the soul moves young as the body ages. And so home becomes this brief intersection of spiritual and physical. Perhaps I passed thought without ever knowing that home was not among tangible symbols of relative location. Perhaps I lost it in the imperfect rhyme of fingerprints on the doorknob and footsteps down the corridor.

We abandoned an entire season, you know. Dropped away and ignored months of a storyline. A year. I think. Of the dead parts of spring. Mornings when not even the strongest coffee would pull us from hibernation and we growled protesting consciousness into our pillows.

My love, this lack of intention is worse than any attentive action. Because I couldn’t. Within the shape and texture of citrus skin. Find words that wouldn’t pucker on my tongue.