if places were people. no. 1

if norman were a person, norman would be curiously normal.
normal norman.
whirlwind romance across flat squares and circles and grey veins of unleafed trees.
we spent a week together and only took pictures
of some things. remember how we met?

remember how some days i wore a dress and you made sure your sky suit was blue
and your breeze flirted with my hair and for a moment
you had all my attention?
i almost remember thinking that not even my long-term relationship with mountains could taint that.

but at the end of the week the whirlwind took me back to my mountains.
and you tainted the mountains with your ink of red clay and azure atmosphere and because you tainted my mountains, you faded just a little.
now the pictures are faded too.

you were just a fling: a moment where your flat land hands held up my feet
and your skies let me breathe for a week
and it was good except it really was just a fling so
i didn't stay.

i think i'm the player because
i think that will happen with every place i meet
i think they will love me for however long i'm there
and then one day i will get up and leave nothing more than a note written

in the sand in california. in the dirt on the outside of an english moat, maybe i'll scratch it into the stones of paris or into a papyrus leaf in egypt or maybe even into a palm tree in the carribean or indonesia. maybe i'll put
the note in a bottle and toss it into the ocean.
all i will leave is a note
and the absence of the perfume that i don't wear.
the note will say "thank you." that's it.
you will be the person i couldn't spend the rest of my life with.

you will be the place where the museums were nice and the skies were blue for the most part but other than that there wasn't much to say or do. there wasn’t much of you.
and now we’ve bumped into each other, 30 years late, and you are the same. maybe
a little grayer. but still flat

with squares and circles of plots where people have pushed you over
and plowed into your dirt. your veins of unleafed trees are a little deeper, still a dull paper gray.
and the only reason that i say "hi" and not "how are you" is because you are still just normal.
you couldn't keep me happy then, and you still can’t now. you’re normal norman.

and maybe that's wrong of me.
maybe one day in another 30 years i'll come back to say that i'm sorry and
i’ll mean it.
maybe one day the whirlwind will take me back to you and we will laugh and watch children play in 

your fields but i will be remembering the way your hand brushed mine 

as you reached for my fallen books and the thud when they fell against the concrete path

the ringing of my phone that made me drop them in the first place.
i will almost remember the painfully normal day before
i met you, when the whirlwind had just set me down.

i can promise you that if it does. if the whirlwind does bring be back to you
i will only stay because my wings have been cut off,
and my feet have blisters that won't go away
i will only stay because i can't leave

and you will write your vows on the other side of the note that i left
and i hope to god
that i don't ever have to see you again.