When forever meant forever,
And whenever meant whenever,
Both of us knew we’d live up to this promise.


But now forever is different,
Remolded, transformed.


How can forever change?
Is not forever, forever?
And whenever, whenever?


How can the everlasting become lasting,
And how can infinity lose its value.


The clock ticks,
It tocks,
It chimes and somehow,
By some mystical power,
Forever seeps like tie-dye into a vat of molding clay,
Like melted crayons,
Only to harden and become an unrecognizable mass.


To redo what’s been done to forever is now unthinkable.
It is impossible and unattainable to return to the whenever you had moments ago.


Because moments were not moments but only seem so to the hazy eye.
Moments were more like days and months and years,
Years of haze and fog scattered by periodic sunlight,
Subsequently swept away by violent monsoon winds.


Moments have become irreparable,
They’ve always been irreparable.


Forever is not the forever you’ve once known,
And whenever is now something unfamiliar.


These terms are unknown,
Spoken as from a dialect never introduced to your young ears,
The implications that are imposed are not those you have made,
These words have no correlation to you.


They are apart,
And you are apart,
And you two depart because business between each other there is not.


Goodbye alien words,
With meanings that to decipher without knowledge of in the first place is clearly unfeasible,
Farewell hooded figures,
A sense of deja vu resides only for an instant until the mist envelopes your silhouette.