I’ve seen you five times now
(or six, or seven),
my eyes catching on your silt-coloured hair
hanging three years longer
than it used to, a forgotten bowl cut
turned curtain, shifting
to reveal an echo
of the know-it-all smirk you once had;
I saw you with a book once,
or rather, my friend did, at a book club
(didn’t say hi),
told me she’d been shocked
to see you and moved on, but my brain
stayed trapped, circling around
that dingy Tim Hortons booth,
that table in the food court where you sat
in a zip-up hoodie,
at a dying laptop, learning about
circuits, or
maybe it wasn’t circuits, maybe I
misread the diagrams
while pretending to look away—
we shared a bus once, only a few stops,
me in a throng of bodies, you on an elevated seat
and for a brief moment I
thought I caught your eye and
you waved, so I waved back,
but then I saw your eyes lock onto another man
waving, pushing himself towards your seat,
starting conversation
about homework and labs and electronics tests
and I shrunk, sinking
into the depths of the vehicle, wondering
if it was my mask
or my height or if
perhaps, you’d never known me,
perhaps, I wasn’t even worth a glance;
I did see you with a book once
at the Tim Hortons, eating ramen noodles
with a tome next to you,
perhaps Eldest,
its red coat and gilt letters
sitting just out of reach of your hands
and I wondered if your reading was banal
and nostalgic—or, perhaps, sarcastic,
self-assigned homework for a scathing critique
of the novel’s oft-cited failings—
I remember how snarky you were,
or could be, latent gems of wit
a backbone, buried so deep
it rarely surfaced, emerging as defence
after months of silence,
swiftly cutting in its descent, or maybe
it was always there, but
only unveiled around friends—
I saw you with your friend a few weeks ago,
a girl I’d passed in hallways and classes and bus stops
and she must have noticed, must have looked me up,
because she followed me back on Instagram;
and I keep seeing your hair,
keep being startled when it sweeps past
and I see it’s you,
keep wondering what I’ll say when I’m brave—
maybe hi, maybe I wish I could say
I miss you,
but I’ve never tried, since I barely knew you,
and you can’t see my face
with a mask on anyway.
Rebecca Kempe is a writer and multidisciplinary artist from Ottawa, Ontario. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in flo., The Ampersand Review, and elsewhere. Her plays Each on Our Side and Signal Breakdown were performed in the 2019 and 2021 editions of the Youth Infringement Festival, respectively. She recently self-published There’s Nothing to See Here/Nothing Happens Here, a two-part zine which explores the stagnant (but at times welcome) stillness of the suburbs she grew up in through photography and prose. More of her work can be found at www.rkempe.ca and you can find her online as @arbeeko.
