Memory tilts the senses,
like a bad night, or a good drink.
The places we go change around us,
forming consistently thickening walls
of cognitive remembrance.
At the bar there is the table where
I sat the first time, with people I just met,
and faces I soon forgot. They are there still,
at the bar, as am I, painted in landscape,
watercolors across canvas.

I danced with you there, same bar,
and you looked up at me with wet,
sparkling eyes and laughed as I made a fool
out of myself for you. We are there as real
as I feel anything, still tainted with the emotion
of that moment.

Drunk, we fought, and the cold taste of that
***** water as it cascaded down my face
is as painful then as it is laughable now.
My friends were shocked and they clowned
me as you stormed off. I didn’t chase you
though I should have.

Memory tilts the senses.
Altering the perception and
introducing bias to the most
casual of environments.
I cannot walk the town in which
I have lived without seeing you.
It cannot be good for the soul to
live in one place too long.
Inevitably, experiences blur together
until there is no place safe from recognition.
It isn’t good. The walls of memory close in and the
prison cell shrinks around us, suffocating us,
forcing us to walk the long way home just to
avoid the restaurant where we went on
our first date.