So he went to Canada. Finally clean and sober, he couldn't remember much of what had happened. Big chunks of time, years on end, were erased. Once in a while a fact would float by. I lost a whole continent.
Memory is so opportunistic.
Balancing on one leg in that dressing room, he was someone else. Seeing him in the flesh, I lost him, lost at least my mental image. I didn't know that while I was watching him he was unconscious, which may have been a cockeyed blessing, since he wouldn't remember the humiliation or the pain of falling out of time. In his sense of things, he wasn't even there. W. S. Di Piero is the author of Skirts and Slacks, Shooting the Works, and other books of poetry and essays.