Ephemeral People in the Subway of the Mind #poetry

(An invocation to the once-met, forever-known)

You stand there —
no, I do. Or perhaps
we flicker in tandem,
like a faulty fluorescent bulb in a midnight metro station —
neither off, nor entirely on,
just humming.

You, with your mismatched socks
and the smell of cardamom ghosting behind you,
buying a single mango from a vendor in Varanasi
in 2009.

I watched.
Or did you?
One of us held a camera,
but forgot to click.

We met — didn’t we?
On that cracked cobblestone in Prague?
Or at the bus stop on Avenue D,
when the rain didn't fall but hovered —
like a decision never made,
a word never spoken.

You asked for the time,
I gave you a poem instead.
You laughed.
I think that’s when I began
carving your eyebrows into the wet clay
of my hippocampus.

What is it, to meet someone, really?
One eye contact?
Two syllables?
Three cigarettes shared in the parking lot of a Walmart at 3 am?
You told me about your pet snake named “Liberty.”
You said:
"People misunderstand constriction.
It’s a form of affection."
And I knew then
I’d never forget you.

You called me “Wednesday.”
Why?
You never said.
You never had to.

Sometimes you only meet people once,
but they tattoo your neurons with invisible ink.
Revealed under ultraviolet heartbreak.

I wrote your name in my coffee foam.
The barista asked if I needed help.

Sometimes you slip into my dreams wearing
a hat made of violins,
and I chase you through an IKEA
that stretches infinitely in all directions,
like grief or memory.

I met a girl in the Paris Métro —
she gave me a paper star
folded from an expired receipt.
She said, "Time is a currency. Don’t waste it on clocks."
Then she vanished,
just like that —
a magician without an audience.

You left your umbrella in my soul.
And now it never stops raining.

Once, in Jaipur,
you told me you loved someone
with the fragility of a spiderweb in wind.
I nodded like I understood,
but I didn’t.
Now I do.
Too well.

We’re all just drive-by artists
etching murals in each other’s fogged windows.

You — with the green shoelaces —
who recited Neruda from memory at the back of the hostel,
while everyone else played Uno.
You kissed me on the forehead and said,
“You look like an unopened letter.”
God.
That sentence built a cathedral inside my ribcage.

Do you know what that kind of architecture does to a person?

I never saw you again.

Sometimes you meet people once,
but they echo.
Like songs you hear in a stranger’s headphones
on the tram in Lisbon.
You never know the lyrics,
but the rhythm haunts you.

Remember the old man who handed you a folded napkin in a diner?
It read:
"You are not broken. Just written in a language
they haven’t learned yet."
He winked.
His eggs were untouched.

You thought you lost that napkin.
You didn’t.
It turned into your spine.

Do we ever meet anyone only once?
Or do they reappear —
as street signs,
as déjà vu,
as the taste of copper on your tongue
when grief returns uninvited?

You —
you walked with me through the alley of tin can chimes,
and told me that memory is
the only immortality we’ll ever get.

I didn't believe you then.
I do now.
I’ve buried entire galaxies in the crease
between your smile and your absence.

And I still carry that single conversation
like a strange coin no vending machine will accept,
but I keep flipping it
hoping it lands on
reunion.

You once told me,
"The universe is just a series of hellos
and too many goodbyes."
I laughed.
You left.
And the joke became prophecy.

I keep seeing your reflection
in train windows,
in elevator doors,
in puddles that don’t belong in this climate.

Maybe you never existed.
Maybe I’m a fiction you once imagined
while waiting for a bus that never came.

But here you are.
Still.
Stillness.
Motion.
Both.

Your voice occasionally dials into the static
between songs on the radio.
I recognize the syllables.
They don’t belong to this world anymore.

But neither do I.

I am made of people I’ve only met once.
I am stitched together with half-smiles,
one-word conversations,
shared umbrellas,
and that moment when our fingers brushed
over the same orange at a farmer’s market.

And you —
yes, you —
you will not leave,
though you’ve long since
boarded the elevator,
the train,
the metaphor,
without me.

Your name is not known to me anymore,
but your silence knows mine.

Sometimes
you only meet people once,
but they never leave.
They just go deeper
until they become
you.

Or maybe
you were me
all along.

Shall we meet again?

#Poetry #EphemeralEncounters #Memory #FleetingConnections #Verse #OnceMetNeverForgotten #MemoryTattoos #Dreamlike