We met at noon between picnic tables and humid Maryland heat.
Either you or the sun made me dizzy, as I talked and you nodded.
We were both distracted by the thought of air-conditioning.

We parted in August among mini-vans and goodbye kisses.
My eyes followed the license plate as you drove away, we agreed to sail catamarans the next chance we had.
We had both noted there was something in the water that summer, something purer than the water from the Chesapeake.

We rejoined in December under a Caribbean sun, not as humid as Maryland’s, surrounded by water purer than the Chesapeake.
There was still a buzz around us, like the air before a Maryland heat storm, to convince us the year of letters was not for naught.

We fell back to old habits on the Dutch side of Saint Martin.
We talked like the future was a choice and we had opted out.
We avoided words like regret and yesterday and repeated words like now, now, now and we spoke in hypotheticals.
We planned our house, or what it would be if we ever got boring enough to say words like tomorrow.

We stopped speaking in July after one thousand four hundred days of avoiding the next.
We should have known we were doomed to fail when “our song” was by Old ***** ******* and “our house” didn’t include a family room.
We should have known when our plans never involved the word tomorrow.