I Woke Up And We Were Twenty-One

By Amelia Fry

It is the unremembered days that I miss the most

The days woven together by fleeting fragments of memory:

Smudged eyeliner, forgotten lyrics to our favourite songs,

Borrowing from our mother’s makeup bag

to apply foundation that was older than we were

as we lay sprawled out on a crooked floor.

We were children together in everything innately human

Doing all of the things that should have been beyond our age,

whilst still making it home for dinnertime.

These days were the making of me.

Now I sit around a sticky bar table

staring through a self-inflicted haze

at faces that I would not have recognised a year ago.

I am six hundred miles and four years away

Wondering what parts of you they hear as I speak.