Every Age Lives at the Same Address

She meets herself first at the edge of a parking lot in winter,

age eleven,

holding a tattered paper ticket softened by glove heat.

*

The child studies her

with the grave concentration children reserve for birds,

funerals,

and women who seem tired in expensive ways.

*

Later,

or earlier, depending on the hallway,

a woman in her seventies waters tomatoes beside a collapsed fence

while cicadas unzip the afternoon.

Silver bracelets slide down her wrist like tiny surrendering moons.

*

“You carried too much through the doorway again,”

the old woman says,

as though continuing a conversation paused back in 1998.

*

The younger versions keep appearing in transitional places —

hotel corridors,

grocery store freezers,

a laundromat glowing aquarium-blue at midnight.

*

One sits cross-legged beneath a classroom desk,

carefully removing her own name from a worksheet

as if identity were a tracking device.

*

Another drifts through a candle aisle in October,

thirty-seven years old and briefly radiant,

smelling cedar smoke where there isn’t any.

*

The oldest self arrives out of sequence.

Always damp from rain.

And always carrying pears in the pockets of her coat.

She speaks in verdicts.

*

And you —

you survive several eras by becoming difficult to categorize.

You spend twenty years mistaking vigilance for intuition.

A locked room forms around every secret repeated too often.

*

Meanwhile,

the child continues wandering freely through the chronology,

small shoes slapping against tile floors inside forgotten houses.

Sometimes she drags entire decades behind her

like loose ribbons.

*

Sometimes she leaves warnings folded into strange places —

inside library books,

beneath garden stones,

between recipe cards filed somewhere in the kitchen.

*

At forty-nine,

the woman watches morning light gather in the kitchen

like a committee attempting diplomacy.

*

Her body startles at familiar tones of voice.

Old machinery, and ancient wiring conducting séances again.

*

From another room,

the elderly woman laughs softly into her tea.

“Every age lives at the same address,” she says.

“You just keep changing the curtains.”

*

Then the theater darkens and the garden floods.

Somebody whispers her name through a cracked screen door in the dog days of summer.

A child somewhere opens her first notebook

and begins recording evidence against time.