The park was a home long before she came to it. We sat there of an evening, she told me about her mother and the wind rushed through our hairs as the lights lit up in the market down the street. It was August, I think. Now, years after, the memory of her still lingers over the overgrown grass, I can't walk past it without thinking of her. I walk faster to escape it. To escape the pull of the past, the girl I was before, before girlhood turned to womanhood, before I grew out of colours and poetry and before my body closed up and disappeared. I don't talk to her anymore because I have nothing to talk to her about but she still likes all my posts on instagram and I know we will have love for each other in our hearts always, even if it fades a little more with every passing year, even as time takes us farther away. In time, I will forget her face but not her name. In time I will forget that too. But the park is still here, and so is the grass and the wind rushing through it and so are we. Her hair is still long and I am in my red sweater. It couldn't have been August then, if I was wearing a sweater. That doesn't matter. The park was a home long before she came to it, and other ghosts linger in the corners. I walk faster to escape it all. The past is not in a place, but just under the skin. I carry it home with me.
