someday. A poem by Amelia Furlong

someday, we will remember the day we walked along the prom at the very beginning
of a pandemic, when the world was still motion & stillness had not settled, the streets
not yet sterile & the chairs stacked on tables, dripping from rain not the spilled beer of
students in their first Galway summers

someday, we will remember the day we walked along the prom at the very beginning
of a pandemic because it was the first day we began to be afraid, the bodies pressing
in around us to make way for skateboarders & rollerbladers, dog walkers & surfers,
urgent in their need to reach the water, to escape where sickness cannot follow

someday, we will remember the day we walked along the prom at the very beginning
of a pandemic because it was the first day in months it hadn’t rained, a shy sun above
a map-blue ocean, I took my jacket off & sunned my shoulders on the black rocks, felt
the distance between our continents like a cleaver at my wrist

someday, we will remember the day we walked along the prom at the very beginning
of a pandemic, how later the wicker streets rose up as if dreaming, as if we’d woken &
the world had changed color, as if we’d stopped hearing language & instead heard
thunder, as if you’d stopped loving me & the end of times followed

someday, we will remember the day we walked along the prom at the very beginning
of a pandemic because we will know how it ended, when we are old & shoveling dirt
from the crevices of our skin, we will call each other, or text or video chat or perhaps
teleport, to reminisce about how quickly life changes, how brief the world is when it
slips away

we will remember what we did & who we became when surviving mattered, when the
beautiful & sacred was easy to swallow, well, I have questions for you, for the you for
whom this is only a memory, like did we take that trip to Connemara? did you come
home with me for the summer? did we do the things we said we wouldn’t, like get real
jobs & health insurance? did the world last & did you love me forever?

……………………

Amelia Furlong writes poetry & lives in Galway.