To the One that Got Away

I count my mistakes like sheep,

Every night I sleep on them.

You had once said,

"Your skin is so soft,"

And, "Your fingers are beautiful,"

And that, "You talk as if you

Would write poetry."

I wonder if what you said was true?

My fingers if,

Looked at long enough

Turn into the branches of a tree

On which nothing ever grows.

Their crookedness is a foretelling.

It predicts the future of my bones,

That was also my mother's past,

And her mother's before her.

As for the softness of my skin, or not

I had never thought of it,

Before you told me so.

When you did,

I had murmured to you

Something I hate to remember,

But I remember it,

One of my many mistakes.

Another, was giving in to wanting

After you told me one night,

That despite my fingers,

And my poetry, still unwritten

And my soft skin,

Despite the many dimples on them,

Each a different size,

I was not enough.

I was just enough to be held in the morning

And to be washed in your moonlight

I was just enough, to be remembered,

And forgotten, and remembered

And then forgotten again, this time forever.

It is too bad I can't forget,

My amnesia and I are not good friends,
I remember all too well,

Your shoes when you walked past me,

Many centuries hence,

Just as I had imagined it to be.

In my imagination, 

I ask you for the seashells I had picked,

And of the dream that you had dreamt,

The one mystery of my life,

Otherwise, a cold and empty desert.

But the world between those two trains,

Where you had appeared again,

Was one that exists beyond my imagination.

And so, that world goes on

You keep forgetting me, and I keep,

remembering it all.