By: Paulo Lorenzo L. Garcia

Walking through the train station
on a hard day’s night
I see her bob cut
brush short of her shoulders.
From behind I could make out a smile
that fanned from one ear to the other
as she weaves through a crowd
rushing in line to buy tickets.
She didn’t need to turn
her ebullience radiates
through the crisp air of night
looping around my feet like manacles

She looks taller now
and her hair is just as short
as the first time

My lips part
and my gaze lingers
I hesitate
Moonily, I muse a gentle digit
near her now stationary frame
working up enough courage
to tap a finger against
her shoulder and call her by the name
not even the heavy sense of tiredness
could convince me I hadn’t known
that woman was not her
and when she turned,
I found only a bemused stranger

What can I say?
I still see you
In the flitting waves,
feel you in the starburst of
emotions long dead.
You still inch into my sleep,
my forgotten dreams
that burst spectacularly
with the force of shrapnels of memory
lodging insidiously into my core
but the core is not my heart
because my heart is no more
It is in the cesspool
of possibility and trampled
upon ways we could have gone
It is lost in the undisclosed din
Of disaster
where dementia and hope
are not two but one

What can I say?
What can I say indeed?
I’m sorry, I mistook you for a friend?

No.

I’m sorry, I was trying
To catch a dream.

###

Paulo Lorenzo L. Garcia writes whenever his mouth can’t speak in his never-ending quest for awareness both of himself and of the people around him. A self-confessed homebody, he writes all the way from Quezon City, Philippines. He is a BSED Graduate, majoring in English. He is currently braving the turbulent waters of the most spine-tingling thought ever to plague the human mind: teaching high school students. His interests include reading classic literature, writing, and the British Monarchy. He is not known to be the life of the party, but rather its gruesome death. You’ve been forewarned. Garcia’s poetry has appeared in Young Writers of Earth and The Literary Yard.