De ja vu'

Those days, hot and sultry as young love,
ended with tea and smoke.
I never smoked, though...or did I not?
Smoke like love is inductive.
When all around you, people smoke and drink and love...
A yearning grows in you.
Which satiates itself in passive inhalation.
Much like falling in love with characters from folds of a dusty classic.
Forgotten and imaginary, just like me.

In the commotion of a roadside stall,
filled with smoke layered conversations that oozed out of us,
like the departing sunlight filtered through a mess of cracked wall and cobwebs,

I had seen you.

I had seen you through a gap within the smoke.
The snakes and dragons of smoke curled around you and you looked somewhere far.
It is as if nothing touched you.
That mad unsettled look in your eyes had settled in some other world.

You felt the weight of my gaze.

I had always wondered how gaze feels like a touch.
Like a deep slumber that has touched your eyes
and you cannot see.

And you looked at me.
The look that came from another world to just look at me.
For a second, two seconds...
Trying to recollect our encounters.
Trying to brush through the dusty classics to find me.
To find someone like me.
Someone who looked like me.
Someone who looked at you,like me.

And when you found none, you scanned my mediocrity.
And looked away,
drowning yourself in a sea of smoke and yearning.