dear one

 Time drags its heels then picks up the pace like a dirty trick turned at dusk or dawn, neither of which is ever the right time to turn a trick, much less a dirty one.  But you know about time in a different way now.  You get to observe how people put time in boxes, with small cages trying to hold it in, the bars carefully measured and spaced to prevent out-thinking the system.  I haven't been with you for a very long time, but I'm with you now that you've been captured again, and I'm with you now like a woman in a tree with her sweater buttoned up accidentally wrong and I love you.

 There are things we could never recover.  We counted to 3 and you broke my heart in a patch of berries along the dirt road near your cottage, you ran so hard.  I broke in half to see you like that before I broke your heart in return.  We were each committed to something no one else could ever understand, and their assumptions were ugly and linear and wrong.  We were wrong, too; we just didn't know it yet.

I'm doing cliche things like 'writing about time' so my language center is flashing red lights all over the place, and one of those red lights lit up the word 'remiss' in my mental dictionary, which caused me to define it: re-miss:  to miss again; redundant loss; a segment of importance that surfaces twice, without awareness granted; a second chance gone down the drain.