I see her in flashes everywhere I go.
Ulises Vargas
May 10, 2026.
I see her in flashes everywhere I go.
I’m taunted by the sight of someone I can’t love,
and who I want to love so badly.
Will everyone have a lover one day?
Who will their lovers be?
Why am I not their lover?
Why are they not mine?
Everyone can be lovable,
but not all at once.
In a million people,
my lover is fragmented
into bits I find in scattered people,
hoping to piece together and find
the lover who’s meant to be mine.
She’s split and she’s fractured
in off smiles and in half-humor;
in red-herrings and faint hints.
Dust flings and dust gravitates,
forming, eventually, a lover,
who is in a million—
flung with millions of borrowed parts—
to love as one Frankenstein.
Her fracture is whole and well.
Her nature is good and tall.
Borrowed from a million loves I’ve had,
her perfection nails perfectly
the spot-on smile and that full-humor
which I fantasized out of a million people
to be the perfect,
perfect one for me;
or else I’m misinformed,
and the fantasy could be better.
and, out of another billion people,
my lover remains lonely,
and I dreamed wrong.
Ripped cloths make a quilt
and the pattern is beautiful
until new cloths make ugly
and I rip the ugly quilt for playing me.