and this is where the words go that tell you what this entry is about, except these particular words don't at all

Untitled, 6/10/09

But I do feel an absence here.

A little bit of something dropped from 30,000 feet on that last trip up, maybe
somewhere over the Carolinas or down in the Blue Ridge mountains. Maybe
I’m being a pessimist and maybe it wasn’t that long ago at all. Maybe you left it
in a drawer in your office under to-do lists and folders numbered
based on priority. Maybe it’s in the freezer in one of the half-empty
ice cube trays. Maybe it’s in your oversized purse—could be anything in there.

You’ll say that it’s me, that I misplace things and maybe I set it down
with the set of house keys I lost weeks ago or threw it in the trash
on 52nd and 10th with my coffee when I stopped to snap a shot
of that bird with the french fry gripped firmly in its beak for all of my followers
on Twitter to see. Maybe I did.

Maybe I left it in my old room, in the closet there, hanging from a hook.
I could have left it on the bus, like I left my phone that one time in January
when I left work in the middle of the afternoon because I was tired
and got off a stop early for fresh cookies from the bakery. We’d been exchanging
dirty text messages and I’ll bet whoever ended up with the phone
got a mighty kick out of that.

Maybe we didn’t lose it at all.

I imagine it on vacation--my kind of vacation: last minute, unplanned,
wholly random. On a bus traversing the corn fields of Nebraska
with a notebook, a camera, and some music.
Three days away from home. Three days of quiet.
It will meet its destination, look around, and come back to us,
but it will not take the same route.

And when it does, we’ll stop what we’re doing.
Your dark eyes will find my lighter ones,
and we’ll know just where to find it.