You

Once you know something it can’t be unknown. You can forget but during those quiet moments; driving in the car with the radio off, or lying in bed late at night, it will creep up on you and remind you that you know it. You are this knowledge. I cannot forget you are here. You creep up on me when I’m not paying attention. You are riding shotgun in my silent car; you hide under my bed and whisper to me in the dark.

I wonder if you think about me. Do you ask your mother how I’m doing?

Even if I try to fold the past and lock it into a small box in the dark recesses of my mind it is still there. I can feel its influence in everything I do. When I sleep sometimes memories leak from the seams and pepper my dreams with out of context images that make no sense but still go on to plague my subconscious with nostalgia long after I’ve awoken.

Last night I dreamt I was in the student union but it wasn’t the union as I really remember it but the union if it looked like the book store. It didn’t make sense but when I woke I found myself thinking about the union and the rain and the day we first met. Like yesterday it had been raining, hammering it down so hard the drops bounced straight off the pavement and into your face, slicing your skin like tiny shards of glass. The union was not a welcoming place, it looked better in the dark when you were too drunk to pay close attention to your surroundings, but it had a roof and so was the only place that you could find a reprieve from the rain and get a drink that you sipped in the vain hope that it would fight the chill settling into your bones. It was Wednesday and I was supposed to be finishing a paper but it was so cold all I could do was chatter and try to thaw out. I couldn’t even hold a pen my muscles had frozen. Instead I stretched out, relaxed against my damp wool coat and watched for the rain to let up.

Then you walked in. I said before that my ability to feel your presence was a gift bestowed by fate but I hadn’t had the gift the first time I saw you. Perhaps fate hadn’t known then, perhaps she was in two minds about our destinies or maybe she’d decided it was too miserable a day to organise lives. It didn’t matter because I saw you and from then on I couldn’t un-see you. You had brown hair then, long to your waist and coiled into a braid. I used to run my fingers through it as you slept on my chest, do you remember? Your shirt was soaked all over and sticking to your body like a wet suit. All the men were looking. You shook your hair out like an animal and wrung it out onto the floor ignoring the exasperated looks from the staff. Then you threw your chin up and marched straight across the room to a table in the back.

As you passed me you gave me a mischievous smile.

I think it was then that fate woke up. I think it was then that she knew, that she let me know, that we were going to fall in love.