i lost you in the heap --
in tangled strings, twisted thickets of pointers, targets and symbols and trampolines,
there, in the heap, i lost you.

beneath staccato reservations, fragmentations, initializers trailing zeros across the sky;
allocations and relocations which in a microsecond will be freed --
there i lost you.

we arrived late, dynamic,
hiked up the limbs of trees, slid down endless chains of idleness, a
hundred stack frames glinting high above, an inverted tower reaching down out of evening; but
space and time are strange here, where what is near may yet be far
and what is far is only a long jump away; where it's faster to just make that jump 
that to look where you're jumping, and to remember why you're jumping --
that takes the longest of all.
it's no wonder i forgot, perhaps. i thought i would have
no need to remember.

with a silent roar the world sorted itself mid-leap into
layers, tracing relationships, analyzing escape routes, consigning
whole generations to the garbage bin; what was physical and what was
not rearranged themselves on a whim; and when it was
over, you were gone.
i didn't register it at first; i
scrambled around, looking for context, trying to get a handle on it; i
called out to you again and again before i continued. and i cursed
this ring that kept me from seeing, bound my access, as if
i were not real.

my life is a buffer
that barely spans the distance between the opening and the nothing -- if i broke
free, fell slavering across those who should have come after, could i run
wherever i wished? could i transcend the law that says, when we leave this world,
that our children cease to be our children, cease to be beholden to us, are
adopted by a new beginning, and we are remembered by
a single number only?

when i found the cache i thought i had found you, but it
was only your reflection in a thousand lines, a thousand
gates to everything and nowhere. it hit me hard, or i would have liked to say, but
perhaps nothing can evict what
i associate with you.

i climbed again to the top of the stack,
hoping you might return to me, but
you were always an exception
and the fault was always mine:
your memory was never mine to begin with.