(remember if you can what it felt like to run away)
because I felt myself compelled
(don’t start a sentence with because)
I said so because I said so because I said so
I am if it's merely lost, because then I can find it
They looked so young sitting there. She had a tattoo on her left hand, bright red at the ends of her hair, a ring in her nose. Neither looked at me just then. They were silent with baby fat cheeks and eyes half-open, her hand half-clasped in his, loosely. He had a backpack. She had a shopping bag between her feet. The hour was not unusual. There—her head on his shoulder, eyes down, with a look of absent-minded defeat—they must be running away. I don't wonder about it. I write it. I write it into existence.
She looked at me with furrowed brows, a sudden show of intensity. (Does she know that I am writing this, their calm fatigue, attempting to remember an impulse I have never felt?)
I switch tenses in the middle of a story. A story about the impossibility of tenses & of time, the absence of memory, the trick to observation (misinterpretation).
With quiet eyes she lifts her head, adjusts the collar of his black down coat, and my idea of them escapes (evaporates?). A girl on the run. His face is blank, her eyes alert. (She can see.)
