“Three years later, a new girl sits cross-legged on your

“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. 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. ” Some things are better left unsaid