You were sitting on the countertop,
not like someone waiting,
but like someone who had already made peace with the evening.
A glass of wine balanced between your hands.
that the shadows softened everything they touched.
You were weaving dreamcatchers.
Pulling thread through empty spaces,
giving shape to something invisible.
And for reasons I still canât explain,
The windows were open to the night.
Your locks were unreliable.
The whole apartment felt unfinished.
Like a song still deciding
what it wanted to become.
moving quietly inside it.
Soft the way moonlight is soft.
Soft the way a river bends around stone
without ever surrendering its course.
I remember standing at the edge of the kitchen,
feeling as though I had wandered
into something sacred by accident.
Some moments announce themselves.
Most arrive dressed as ordinary evenings
and only reveal their importance years later.
Not who you would become.
Not what we would survive.
Just that I needed to know
what lived behind your eyes.
Needed to hear the stories
that made your hands move that way.
why the room seemed to lean toward you
Nervous implies uncertainty.
Certain in the strange, unreasonable way
a compass is certain of north.
As though some part of me
had already started walking toward you
before the rest of me understood why.
So I brought you my motherâs lasagna.
A recipe carried through years
I picture that you ate it standing
that it was becoming a memory
I would carry for the rest of my life.
Because every now and then,
someone appears in the world
and the air around them feels different.
As if life has briefly opened a hidden door
and allowed you to glimpse
Something that will not come twice.
it would be the last lasagna she ever made for me.
Didnât know that years later
I would reach backward through memory
trying to touch that season again.
The girl sitting on the countertop
with thread wrapped around her fingers
and starlight gathering in her hair
and despite her own pain,
still carried warmth in her eyes.
Even if someone had whispered
exactly how precious that meal would become.
Exactly how few chances remained.
Exactly how quickly time would move.
I still would have crossed that room.
Still would have stood there
at the edge of the kitchen.
Still would have handed it to you.
Because you donât protect the memory.
You walk directly into it,
and let it change your life.Â