Thirty

You always remember your friends, from the years of acquaintances, east or west, across the North Atlantic or North Pacific, and regardless of the distance in time or space, all the same you remember them, fetching back their faces, voices, and personas adhering to those passing years; the time when you left your city, a time when you’d just gone through your own life crisis, a time when life began foreign and anew here; horse races continued to run and Disco Disco stayed open there. You remember them in memories stored in your brain lobes, from home-made videos, images kept on compact discs and hard disk drives; in locked rooms, as if, over the years, the doors have never been opened. Fine, the condition goes both ways. Time missing is time suspended; nothing changed, like editing movies in the old days, cut and paste, splicing the precise moment and gluing it back in place. But the next second, seeing you face to face, those memories collapse, years melting away, and in less than an eye blink, twenty years have vaporized. Faces of our youthful past have waned; counting years in grooves, in rings, in twilight, in pale ink.