“I loved you long before you loved me. It's the only thing I have you beat at, and I'll bring it up every chance I get.”*

She was sitting on the beach
wearing the tiniest bikini
staring out at the perfect Adriatic.

She sat alone, which considering
her beauty and elegance
seemed some cosmically bad joke.

Unlike myself, I approached her,
flashed my guileless 17-year-old smile,
and said hello, fully expecting
a giant older brother or even
Poseidon himself to appear
from nowhere and ****** me.

She spoke a lilting English
with an accent I could not name.
She said her name was Marisa
and she was twenty-one.

Next morning, in my two dollar room,
after an exhausting night of abandon
during which she moaned and peaked
three times, she dressed as I lay
shrivelled and worn out
as a mummified banana.

She told me she had come here
to be alone a little because
next week she must marry
an older man whom she did not love
chosen as was custom by her parents.

She said she would remember me
as the last morsel of passion
she would ever know in this world.

She kissed my forehead and left.

I had no words.

I never knew her last name
nor ever saw her again.

The Wheel spins, the particles dance,
we can never know the trajectories
that chance encounter can engender
nor what shapes the next round brings.

The next day I left for Greece
uncertain of what had even happened.

I still don't know. I never will.

But I think I may have met her again...

  ~mce