Forty years tonight. Since our eyes met. Another world. Before marriage, mortgage, kids, divorce. Before distance. Before I knew who I was. You were. Before we touched and everything shattered. Before you wrote your number on the back of my hand. Now, like a faded tattoo, barely visible. Was it ever there? Did I wash it off without care?

The silence that became of us is beautiful. It does not clutter. It stretches, wide like a sky, as though it were the same kind of possibility that abounded that night – when there were mere inches between us, and I could feel the warmth of your body. We could be anything now.

I write these words on the skin of infinity. A call to action. Recall that it was so. Wondrous and ordinary. Wild and confined. When we knew only ourselves, before everything else. Before forgetting.