Background

It sort of ended like this:

Everything went back,

Everyone reversed,

People that died came back,

And people who were born weren't.

It wasn't like a film in reverse,

Or maybe it was like that for God I don't know,

But for everyone here it just was,

It felt exactly like going forward,

But with a new righteous purpose,

A righting of wrongs we couldn't live with,

But we forgot what it had been,

The first Time we lived.

Still everything changed,

People who went to the carnival didn't,

(They felt like they already had)

Didn't meet their former friends,

Didn't get sick on caramel apples,

Got sick on bad shrimp instead.

Our brains tried to hold on though,

Righteousness is an opiate to them,

Poor things,

So many flashes and firings,

Desperate synapse connections,

Trying so hard to fix something we did.

Or made,

Forever ago.

I was lucky - when I went back,

I ended up right where it started,

And I could feel the forgetting,

Like an ink, dark and secret-kept,

Secreting from my senses,

But before it draped over me,

I was lucky - I just said "Hey."

She just said "Hey." with disinterest seeping,

Turning back around.

As we kept walking,

I was caught up in the sunrise assailing the ivied building,

And I felt everything getting better,

My heart began to shake,

So much I didn't know how much longer I would live,

But I'd already done it once,

So that was less of a threat,

And when I ended up living again,

I forgot everything I did,

But held on to that one morning,

When I fixed it,

When my brain rested while my body walked,

It sort of began like this:

"Hey."

"Hey."

Do you see?