SOU — CDG — LGW

I emptied my dorm

You did not

It would take me four years to return

You would be back in only six weeks

We sat, giggling at the gate, breathless, in love

I licked the melted chocolate from the vents of my laptop

Essays all handed in, now Paris awaited

Stress like storm clouds broke

Laden with exchanged gifts and eyes bright

With all that’s promised on our boarding passes

Wholly here and nowhere else

Together, we’re home

The tiny plane boarded all at once

Adventure lay ahead and we had

Neither time nor inclination to acknowledge

The week after next

A restless week in la Ville-Lumière

Sightseeing, bite eating, wine drinking, cresting

Touring galleries and exploring our anatomies

Exhilarating in its ups and downs

Absurd moments, gentle breakdowns, blurry snapshots

Bad French and cigarette butts

We moved from the Place de Clichy

To a palace on the Seine

Ice sculptures glittered outside while we wallowed

In a sea of blankets where this girl learned to be a woman

Planning our reunion, our rising tide, our kids

And whether we’d take them to soccer or football

Lavish breakfast laid out before us at the high water mark

As the wave finally broke and rolled back

Our love washed out to sea

And dashed upon the Dover cliffs

Our roads diverged in a corridor

Abruptly, inevitably, unforeseeable and obvious

The glamour of our forever shattered

Time stopped. We stopped. The bustling murmur did not

Eyes locked, like hearts and thoughts, begging me: stay

This was always going to happen

No amount of pretending could stop us from ending

But just maybe, if we stayed where we were…

I think we both knew our future was false

So we lingered, unwilling to give up our present

I moved first, silent sobbing through security

And just like that, we became the past.

Your pain and my regret hang heavy on my heart

Like your old lever lock still hangs on my keyring

I should never have flown back to Atlanta

When Berwick was waiting for me