In another life

Tell me more about us,
tell me that I am still yours,
that you haven’t let me get lost in your thoughts,
amidst other lives and other faces.

Tell me again how you searched for me
in places where I was not,
and how, in lonely evenings, you called out for me—
yet I never came.

And you don’t understand—just as I don’t—
how it is that you miss the whole of me.
Tell me, too, that I should forgive.

And then, when you have said it all,
I will tell you that I no longer remember loving you;
I no longer even recall that I suffered,
or that I wept with my fists clenched tight.

And even if I did know,
even if I could still remember,
what good would it do?

I loved you—
or perhaps I only imagined it—
in another life,
a life from which you departed.

Of the "me" from back then,
I know nothing—I am no longer that person;
and as for you, as you are now—
you have come too late.