speak, false memory

And so, in a small timber house of my own invention,
somewhere on the mid-north coast ,
I sit on a wooden table that never existed, swinging my legs, waiting. The timber of the table is worn and smooth, this table that never was.



I can see his bed, and all his bedclothes rumpled up. He doesn’t know I am here, just yet.
There is his cat, watching me.
I am watching out the window, seeing green hills: these I know to be there, and still are.

Finally,
He comes to his door, I can see the faded flannel shirt through the glass, his face looking down as he opens he door, before he comes in and finds me there, waiting.

I tell him I have been waiting a long time, that it took me a day to get there.
I tell him I have left everything behind.
I didn’t need to tell him. He knew
I am holding the edge of the table with my hands.



I can barely breathe with the wanting, and the fitting together so neat and effortless that it is the sun coming up, like the sun coming up after the world being black.


I wanted all that so much, that it has embedded itself, alongside things filed away, that were real. I know it wasn’t real, but the wanting of it was. The possibility of it, the lostness of it.

The absence of this is a void that still knocks the breath from my chest: the absence a presence, in which I remain immersed.

None of this ever happened.