if I wore a different pair of socks / on that random Tuesday

there is safety in numbers, and distance and she held two sheets of wrinkled paper – ones - together they never touch

she slid her fingers up up along my cheek cold & tiny crystalline tendrils of clouds we never touch anymore

it’s atomic and all the space that fills the space could fill a symphony or a universe

but i feel her breath across the gap in words and whispers left out for the morning route.

we’ve never touched and we orbit in different arcs but still i feel her fingers

and still she feels a sound that rumbles loose a whimsy and looks up at an empty alley where I might have been

if I wore a different pair of socks on that random Tuesday and turned left three years back instead of walking straight

but its where I am here on a tattered couch and there in an empty chair across from her in a cafe where stranger things have happened

like a song written for a girl who never knew what played on that radio or stretched across a screen was for her. but it made her feel uncertain

and she felt everywhere all at once and wrote it down in words & whispers those are how I feel her.

we never touch i said but when we draw ourselves up & near enough we bond.