I thought, I remember you! He had appeared once in a doorway in the fall, year 2006. I can recall feeling uncertain, and insecure, clinging to the acquaintance whom I bore no interest in for the sake of being acquainted. Now we were standing in front of her full-length mirror. Her breasts were bulging out of her top, and likewise with her midriff. I pretended to admire the decorations on the wall, compliment the comforters and the stale, institution-like charm of it all. He stood in the doorway as she laughed a shrill cadence of manufactured approval. Boys! New boys. They’d all been drinking alcohol, fascinating. I felt fourteen and twenty-four altogether, a regenerated life deadfall in a girlish figure. I became excited in anticipation of an evening brimful of havoc, and distributed my phone number accordingly.

All this gave way to a false relief, and the tension between who I was and wasn’t. For every day I tried, I grew further from myself; and growing further, I fell faster. Now I was walking faster, away from I remember you! and toward I’m going to forget you. Or better, I’m going to forget you, and the person I was that year.

Not to ostracize necessary growth, but to keep moving forward. I whistled, The ants go marching two by two…

Nothing but a passing.