The Version I Dreamed

I knew you again / For a little while / You were standing in the kitchen / Wearing the shirt you used to wear / There was coffee on the counter / And your keys beside the sink / You asked me if I was hungry / Like no time had passed at all / I remember being happy / Before I remembered why / The room was almost accurate / Except for the windows / Outside, the street had changed / The bakery was somewhere else / Your old apartment had a garden / Though it never had one then / You told me about your brother / I knew he'd been gone for years / But in the dream he was laughing / From another room upstairs / I woke up with your name / Caught somewhere in my mouth / Then came the ordinary things / Toothpaste / Keys / A train going past / On the bus I heard our song / From a car beside the road / I almost turned to look for you / Before I remembered / A woman at the pharmacy / Had the same perfume you wore / For half a second / The whole morning rearranged itself / I thought I missed you / But I missed the person / Who could still become somebody / When you walked into the room / I missed the version of me / Who hadn't learned the ending / There you were / Then you weren't / There you were / Then you weren't / And that was the strange part / I wasn't sad / I spent the afternoon remembering / Things I hadn't remembered before / The cheap restaurant near the station / The broken lift / Your terrible handwriting / The way you always lost your keys / None of it felt important / Until the dream gave it back / By evening / I couldn't remember your face clearly / Only the kitchen / Only the coffee / Only the feeling / That for a few borrowed minutes / We had never gone wrong