Who are you?

Would you have recognized me, too, if I had approached you at the bar? Would you have had the same feeling: that we loved each other, once, that it was a chaos and that it was dangerous, but that we had done it?

To see you as I entered the place with my date around my arm, I nearly muttered your name, but no name could come. Kimberly. Kim. No. Something french. The hollowness sat at the back of the tongue and there was no answer. I see your face in my mind the same way I saw it there: the blackness of a candle lit lounge, your paleness, the black and crying eyes, the sad and unwholesome beauty you own, like a ghost. And how is it that I can see your collar bones in this whispering memory, too, but I can’t find your name? How is it that I know how your neck smells, and how the taste of your perfume can be bitter when tasted, and how is it that I know that you are sad, and lonely, and that in the morning you lay in bed long into the afternoon, your bleach blonde hair won’t be washed another day, your bathrobe worn and holey, your ashtray overfull, you haven’t aten in days.

Why, spectre, do I know you, but can’t approach you? Why is your gloom so beautiful to me, if not because we have loved each other, and held eacother in a dark place, and found bonds in our solitude that way? Why, darling, evil, do I need to cry with you once more, if maybe I never did?

Certainly you are beautiful. And I am lonely. So I have held you in my chest like a meditative breath since spotting you, the other night, and wondering, if maybe, one second to the next, your name would come to me, the memory would arrive, and then, then what? I could call you. Send you a message. Rekindle what ever damp, and water-soaked fire pit I can feel, with eyes closed or open, in the pit of me.

I must have found you once on the Internet, and you don’t know me. How darkness can be a mirror better than anything. I know you perhaps. Like I know myself, without wanting it.

Still, how warm it might be, for you to let me in, for you to have waved and smiled and displaced all the blackness in the place with a friendly recognition. There I am, you would say. There I am.