I’ve known you for so long now, I feel you imprinting on my memories. You’re in the bushes on the Easter I had chicken pocks and couldn’t search for eggs. You’re guiltily giggling at me as I am the only little kid putting in fake teeth to eat dinner. You’re grimacing with me as I do my physical therapy, my tiny legs shaking with pain, in the living room of my childhood home.
And I find myself in your stories, rooting for you as you escape from a menacing goat. I’m behind a telephone pole the day you sprained your ankle on a trampoline. I’m blending into the landscape when you’re sulking around Grand Canyon, too mad about not getting candy to care about the massive chasm in the ground beside you.
These memories converge and overlap, like double exposures kept for humor’s sake. They see a future lifetime shared and buckle from exclusion. They refuse separation. They hug close together and bleed through, superimposing and impressing on each other until the mingling is complete and irreversible.
I’m there the night we met, looking over my own shoulder at you, seeing all the things I don’t remember and finding details I’d hate to forget. At that moment I love you doubly, as I do today, as I will forever.
The things that are wrong with my brain 