when i said let’s circle back to that i really more meant, perhaps, in a different era, a different city, another life. let's circle back to it when we're old, or maybe when we're young again...we'll circle back in vienna, or in cairo, or in those slender black cat streets of Paris, streetlamps and gossip and vibraphone.

we'll share drags on cigarettes & dregs of bitter campari cocktails; orange peels spent for their oil and yellow paper spent for useless diagrams littering the table. we'll laugh about how we misspent our early years, and swell with misplaced pride at how well young people seem to be spending theirs.

when we circle back, we'll regard the room in satisfied lulls, fighting wars against our own midwestern urges to declare it's about that time — & when those wars are won we'll dive back into endless conversation of books we read & especially books we didn't, raising & dropping our voices like waves.

i didn't mean, let's discuss this later in the week, i meant let's reconvene when we've wrought enough stories of ourselves that it can't matter anymore. let's not speak until we have shaken our shoulders loose of Thoreau's dreaded details, until we can remember lives made of desire, of sensuality.

imagine us as old people, picking our way sheepishly through stories of great soul-quickening loves we shared with lovers whose names we can't remember: we'll scrounge for specifics in our minds like looking for shards of green glass in a battlefield, long grown over with tall, sighing buckwheat.

o, imagine what strangeness will be carelessly felled across the path in the forests of our memory — and old friends, we can work together across that paris cafe table to heave those obstacles out of the way, sweating and laughing, and resting often, as it will be hard labor.

and if, with all the detritus from bold, passionate, irresponsible and gluttonous lives cleared from view, we remember these discarded, woefully unfinished action items from this "15 min sync for XFN alignment", then perhaps we may, at last, circle back.