Ten Years

Because you don't know what you do.

 

 

            Ten years from now, you will not remember what you did to me. I will walk into your classroom--and perhaps my name will still fall from your lips with an edge of laughter, perhaps your eyes will brighten, perhaps I will have sent enough letters to manage that--but you will not remember what you did to me. Perhaps you will have never known.

 

But in ten years I will stumble back into your world with my soul dusted with words from the world over. They will have taught me things. I will know then that the dust inside the spine of an old book smells the same in London in Rome in New Delhi in New Amsterdam now known as New York. That words taste the same the world over, and so do the lips of lovers. And that the handprints of men who loved me for a night or a month or maybe their whole lives or maybe never loved me at all – they all bruise the same colors in the morning. Because when a place is ‘everywhere’, it is nowhere and everything is nothing and all the architecture of the Coliseum and le Tour Eiffel and the ribs of Roman Catholic cathedrals are nothing compared to the everything of the bones in your ever-graceful hands.

 

It will have taken me ten years of travel, of the everything-everywhere-everyone existence of a person who, in an attempt to become someone, became no one, to learn this and finally come home.

 

But, perhaps, in ten years, my name will still fall from your lips.

 

Falling from my lips will be words that taste like the tomb of Lenin in the Red Square, the wind in the streets where the Paris commune once banned midnight baking in favor of midnight love making, the summer thunderstorm that fell on the Shakespeare festival the same day it rained in LA.

 

And perhaps my name will fall from your lips, edged with laughter. This time, I won’t look away.

 

And a girl in the front row of your class will look at me with stars in her eyes because I have what she wants; twenty years from now, you will never know what you did to her either.

 

Your eyes, your hands, your voice, your life: you devastate the world to dust. I’ve been around and about and bruised by many men, but you? You will never remember what you have never done.