Where Light Begins

for Elizabeth Jane Anderson

I.
In the geometry of our glances, there is an equation,
a theorem of light and shadow
that calculates the distance between two points of sorrow,
two points of joy. You are the constant, I am the variable.

II.
At the café where we first learned the angle of each other’s smiles,
the sun cuts across the table in slices so thin
we could spread them on toast, or just let them melt
into the hot bitterness of our coffee.

III.
You said, "Remember this," like it was a simple algebra,
a line graph charting the heart’s strange physics—
as if memory were a place you could step into,
like stepping into a river and not changing the water.

IV.
But memory is a room with unreliable light.
Here, the walls move like lungs. There are corners
so sharp they could cut our story clean in two—
leave us gasping at the sudden shortness of narrative.

V.
You laugh, and it sounds like a page being turned in another room,
a page I am not yet ready to read.
There is an art to folding moments, you say,
so that they unfold in the future, exactly when needed.

VI.
There are words for this in every language, but none fit
in my mouth. They are always too large, or too bright,
or too heavy with the weight of what is not yet forgotten.

VII.
So, we stand, two figures in a landscape drawn by Hopper,
all light and longing and unreachable faces,
in a diner that serves endless cups of silence
with a side of what-might-have-been.

VIII.
Always remember us this way—
not as a perfect story, or a solved equation,
but as an unfinished poem that loves its own breaking,
a poem that reads us, over and over, as if we are new,
as if we are words worth saying, worth saving,
in the draft where all light begins.