Three years later, a new girl sits cross-legged on your bed. She
tastes like a different flavor of bubblegum than you are used to.Â
She opens up a book that you had to read in high school, and a
folded picture of us falls out of chapter three. Now there are
two unfinished stories resting in her lap. Inevitably, she asks,
and you tell her. You say: I dated her a while back. You don’t
say: Sometimes, when I’m holding you, I imagine the smell of her
vanilla perfume. You say: She was younger than me. You don’t
say: The sixteen summers in her bones warmed the eighteen winters
my skin had weathered. You say: It’s nothing now. You don’t
say: But it was everything then.Â