Reunion

The curtain stirs. Six burnt matches lie in the bleak ashtray, patterned on the cold glass, the petroglyph of an ancient, unintelligible people -- us, thirty years ago. Us, last night.

When you were seventeen your hair fell across the scimitar curve of your jaw, and I grieved to watch your fingers sift leaf into the papers and twist them closed. You smelled of vanilla and sulfer, cinnamon and tobacco.

Last night you said, "how could we have wasted all that time?"

It would not have been kind to answer, "we are still wasting all that time."