Me like, Beth.
--------
I
I must have told the story a hundred times
About how, when we were young, five or six,
You decided to wash a pair of shorts.
You put them in the washer, and, not knowing how much detergent to add,
Dumped in half the box.
When we checked on the shorts, fifteen minutes later, the washer had overflowed;
And a landslide of suds was spreading slowly across the garage floor.
I would tell this story, smiling at the memory,
Remembering how this was just the sort of thing you would do.
My listeners, 2500 miles from ever meeting you, would smile politely.
They’d heard it before, and, to their chagrin, knew they’d hear it again.
Any novelty or humor in the story had long since worn off.
I kept telling it, though, not for my uninterested audience but as a way of telling myself:
“I lived this! I have a past! This happened!”
Trying, as always, to bridge the 2500-mile, six-year chasm
Between that life and this.
II
Last summer, in an eerie reenactment of my hometown,
I sat in the passenger seat of your car.
You were there, driving, a flesh-and-bone apparition of my childhood memories,
Six years older, but the same profile, same voice, same stance.
As we headed out of the neighborhood
I felt out-of-place, artificial, unwanted,
trying to slide effortlessly back into a role I’d voided in a former life.
“Hey,” I said to break the silence, “remember the time you tried to do laundry?”
The question hung awkwardly between us, an unexpected, personal remark between strangers,
until an eternal second later we both began to laugh, and we were friends.
I told the story again, the hundred-and-first time
And you filled in the other half, your side, details I’d forgotten.
And we laughed, because I was there, and you were there,
and together we could witness our shared past, each knowing because the other confirmed it
that it happened.