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

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.