The divine has placed us / In a small world

– Bilal, “Reminisce” (2001)

oh, but of course i have thought of you. seen you in past, present, and future. in our befores and afters. seen you sideways in time and seen your side view. i remember your sideview often. those occasions where the universe lets me skip past the temporal-spatial quandries of the present, i saw your sideview before i would have seen it later.

C has said how, in many contingencies with anyone else i have ever known, i knew you in past lives. of course it was not our first time. although compared to others, our relations were newer. which is to say, less baggage, and some very faint inklings of back then.

when i know you sideways, i know what could have been. knowing how we would have spent more time where we were younger. me, still shy, but attempting to be direct. what your next tattoo would have been, i would never have expected still. i make certain decisions to be more courageous, to deal with certain demons from my past, all so that they will never get to hurt you. all this sideways knowledge.

somewhere in the deep past is still something about you i have yet to remember. maybe it is something plain and whimsical. i like the sound of the word whimsical. i think about how it would sound like when you play it with your tongue. perhaps the tinkling that comes with your own enunciation is what i will eventually recall. that timbre that soothes me so deep. it has a forest feeling to it. and the forests and jungles are sites of low intensity warfare across communities, peoples, and tribes — arborescence and fauna and slime alike. i hear your timbre ringing through the forest, reaching into time like a swift blade, heavy like claymore. medieval longings in misty proportions, dark as the emergent bog.

later i will see you. in many laters i continue to see you. in many laters the happiness i have wished for you, each incantation varying from tic to guttural stops to syntactical choice to what vocabulary to invoke, manifests sideways across the continuum of the real. each time you receive bountiful harvests, i delight upon my work, all my assistance, and sit back in relief. whatever they call it — possible worlds, universes, timelines — to see how in so many of them, you are cared for and given space, in each contingency in each chance in each phase transition… it leaves my heart molten, unguent, aglow.

now, i show you my red lips. sideways i show them to you too. if you recall anything about me, shall it be this across lives and deaths.