An unfinished book.

 Three years later, a new girl sits cross-legged on your bed. 

She tastes like a different flavor of bubblegum than you are used to. 

She opens up a book that you had to read in high school, and a folded picture of us falls out of chapter three. 

Now there are two unfinished stories resting in her lap. 

Inevitably, she asks, and you tell her.

You say: I dated her a while back. 

You don’t say: Sometimes, when I’m holding you, I imagine the smell of her vanilla perfume.

You say: She was younger than me. 

You don’t say: The sixteen summers in her bones warmed the eighteen winters my skin had weathered.

You say: It’s nothing now.

You don’t say: But it was everything then.