The heart remembers everything it loved and gave away,
everything it lost and found again, and everyone
it loved, the heart cannot forget.
—Joyce Sutphen
It is not true that the heart
remembers everything it loved
and gave away. Just today
I recalled that sweet Mormon boy
who I fell in love with
at a speech tournament
in the final round when
he beat me. What was his name?
I recall how we would meet
at greasy spoons in Denver
and eat eggs and pancakes
late, late at night. He was slender,
and had dark hair and such
sincere eyes, and I loved
to laugh at his clean, clean jokes.
You could argue he was found again
in the heart’s archives
after passing a late night restaurant
that reminded me of the one we liked,
but he is more forgotten to me
now than remembered.
It is perhaps, like
how my husband and I
now take our children
with us on trips to foreign lands.
I remember my husband’s mother saying,
You know he won’t remember it,
speaking of my three-year-old boy.
And I thought, that is not the point.
The point is that we travel. That
he learns right now what it is
to be a citizen of the world.
And so it is he has grown to love
travel and people and learning new things
and seeing new landscapes and
saying thank you in other tongues.
And he does not remember
a thing about Argentina.
And so it is, perhaps, that
all of those lovers I don’t remember,
and the ones who I vaguely do,
they were in their way
all preparing me to be a better
love to you. Although I have forgotten
names and conversations,
inside jokes and back alley kisses,
the heart perhaps remembers
how it opened then. It was practicing
the best it could to love you now,
though we do not have now
what I thought that love would look like.
How simple it was then, a side
of maple syrup, a car with a full tank of gas
and a whole night that lasted
partway to forever.
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