The door is open.
Why don’t you come in and stay a while?
Time keeps her counsel at the threshold, seeing you,
Stranger, soon familiar with its
handle and temperamental hinges, the days it’ll give.
I wonder if I will remember
the tale of that bruise, and the fresh elation of an earned grin,
or carpet under feet, the weight words gather in light of listening,
as I reveal all of me to you.
You, who will unearth layers of the past,
an uprooted tree, a blossoming connection on foreign soil.
Oh, your unexplored spaces. We’ll map the land
and know the roots go deep within the ground.
I feel less far. Won’t cry for hometown streets
Or the impermanence of seasons, out a bedroom window.
We try catch the autumn as it yields to winter, the tick of a clock
that cannot be caught. We can only wonder where the leaves will fall.
Perhaps I’ll photograph you under the lights, try not to smile too wide.
And you’ll learn the rhythm of my corridor;
its cadence matches yours. Or, if you’re gone in a year,
please leave me with the shape of your
absence. Poorly taken pictures clinging to mirrors,
the echo of laughter and knocks on shared walls,
the dry flakes of yesterday’s face paint.
Those soft-worn relics of a room once inhabited.
Oh, how sweet is the unknowing.
The future’s memories wait fathomless at the edge
of our lives. Once new hands to hold, I hope,
twice old under time’s gentle touch.
Only she foresees the length of your stay
and smiles at the innocence of new beginnings.
Illustration Via Mio Shinohara @mio_shinohara_art for The Student
