A Breath

My name – you always liked to say it. To breathe it, because it is easy to breathe. One syllable.

‘Always liked’: what tense is that? Completed action in the past. That past completed, and broken from the present. That whole past drifting into the archive, to return in dreams, passing across the threshold of the morning and the threshold of the evening. Unguarded hours, when the past is stronger than the present.

But now that past is completed, rounded off. It will not change; it is all there. At the threshold, returning: the promise of my name, the past broken from my present.