Say the years went on without us, as they did, as they do, indifferent and generous at once, handing each of us a different life like a coat cut to someone else's shoulders. Say I took the road that bent toward work, toward cities, toward the long fluorescent hours where I learned to answer _fine_ before anyone finished asking. Say you took the one that bent toward quiet, toward some town with a river in it, a porch, a dog that knows your footsteps, a life I can only furnish in my mind with whatever light I miss the most. Say there were other people. There were. I won't pretend. Good ones, kind ones, who loved me in the daylight way, and whom I thanked, and meant it, and still, some nights, turned toward the wall to listen for a sound that wasn't there. --- I imagine you married, maybe, or maybe not, maybe something that doesn't need a name or a ring. I imagine a birthday, a graying temple, a winter you survived that no one saw you survive. I imagine you learning things I'll never be told: how you take your coffee now, which songs you can't hear in the car, what you do with your hands when the house is finally still. And I think of all the days that went to waste on me without you in them, all the ordinary Tuesdays, the ones that mattered most precisely because nothing happened, and how I never got to hand them to you, small and unremarkable, and say, _here, this is what I did today._ --- But I keep coming back to this. The thing I can't put down. Say, somehow, a door. A crowded station. A wedding. A funeral. A street in some city neither of us lives in, rain coming on, the sky going gray at the edges. Say I look up from nothing, from a phone, from a menu, from my own shoes, and there you are, older, certainly. Altered, surely. A little more weathered by the hours. And you look at me. And I know, I _know,_ the way you know a stair is missing in the dark, that it will not be strange. --- Because that's the part I can't explain to the friends who say I've moved on, who say that people change, who say you can't step in the same river twice. They're right. They're right about all of it. We've both been rivers, long since. We've carried different silt, cut different banks, run through different country. But I think there's a place in a person that doesn't take the weather. A room the years don't enter. And I think that room is where she lives, and I think, if we met, that you would feel it too, the quiet click of something fitting back into its place. --- We'd say the awkward things first. _You look well._ _So do you._ _How long has it been?_ _Too long._ _Not long enough._ _I wasn't sure it was you._ And we'd laugh, a little, the kind of laugh that is mostly breath, the kind that's a door being tried to see if it still opens. And then someone, you or I, would say something small. A joke only we would catch. A half-finished thought about a place we used to go. The tucked-back hair. The half-second before the laugh arrives. And that would be it. The years would fold up like a map that has finally been understood, and we would be sitting in the same booth, the same quiet, the same unfinished sentence, as though the pause between were only a breath taken before saying the next thing. --- Nothing changed. That's what I keep saying to the dark. Not _nothing happened._ So much happened. But nothing _changed,_ not the thing underneath, not the way my name sounds in the particular shape of your mouth, not the ease, the terrible, wonderful ease of being known without having to explain. We'd pick it up the way you pick up a book you left face-down on the arm of a chair, and find the page, and find your place, and the story, patient as ever, would simply go on. --- And maybe that is the cruelest part, or maybe the kindest. That I could stand in front of you after all this time and not need a single word of the past to be repaired, only to sit, and be near, and hear you tell me about your life, the river, the dog, the porch, and feel, for once, no ache at all, just the long exhale of a thing finally set down. Or maybe it would hurt more than ever. Maybe I'd see exactly what I lost in the plain light of an ordinary afternoon. Maybe the embers, given air at last, would catch, and climb, and I'd have to walk home through the rain carrying a fire I'd spent years teaching myself to bank. I don't know. I only know I'd walk toward it anyway. --- So here is where I leave it. Not a plea. Not a plan. Just a light kept on in a back room, a chair pulled out at a table, a place set that no one has asked for. If the road ever bends the way roads sometimes do, if the rain comes on and a door opens in some city neither of us calls home, I will know you by your hands, by the way you tuck your hair, by the quiet that goes still around us like a held breath. And I will say nothing grand. I will not ask for what was lost. I will only say, softly, the way you say a thing you have been rehearsing for years and have never once forgotten: _Hi. It's me. Where were we?_ And you will smile, the whole smile, the one that takes you over, and say, _Right here._