Ancient Times

Butterfly Division

Many years ago, in a softer season of my life,
there was someone who knew the quiet ways I spoke
how I lingered in doorways,
how I laughed a second too late,
how I said “I’m fine” and meant something else.

We built something then
not grand, not eternal,
but real enough to leave a shape behind.
It unraveled slowly, as these things do,
not with thunder
but with the quiet forgetting of how to stay.

Time carried us off in different directions.
New streets, new names, new mornings
that didn’t include each other.
And yet
every so often, without warning,
you return.

In the curve of a stranger’s smile,
in a song I don’t remember learning,
in the feeling of almost calling someone
and not knowing who.

I wonder what your life became
if you found what we were reaching for,
if you still tilt your head when you listen,
if you still leave books half-finished
on the edge of the bed.

Do you ever think of me
the way I think of you?
Not often just enough
to pause in the middle of a day
and feel something unnameable
pass through.

We were once a whole story.
Now we are a question
that time never answered.

And still, somewhere between memory and forgetting,
I keep a place for you
not to return to,
but to exist, quietly,
as someone who mattered
and still does, in a distant, untroubled way.