I am feeling the need to provide a bit of background on this piece.
It is written for my first love about a night we shared a little more than 25 years ago. The poem is 100% accurate and I took no liberty with details, though the fact that it's almost too sweet might suggest that I idealized it. It's absolutely literal. The reason I emphasize this is because I suffer from severe and often complete memory loss. I wrote the poem as a gift to my boyfriend at the time, to show him that this one perfect memory has not yet vanished, and because I wrote it in flawless detail it never will. My vicious and almost total loss of nearly all our memories has been extremely painful for him. That I had total recall of this special night and vivid details blew him away and shocked him to tears. I wanted to show him with a poem that all is not lost. That it was his first vocal admission of love was beyond emotional for both of us, brave for him, and an unexpected dream come true for me. It was almost too beautiful, under the magic of the fireworks. That we were truly and totally in love made it pure and perfect-and truly a dream, especially for me, with fairy tale expectations that my first declaration of love would be perfect and true under a sparkling sky. The point is that it was perfect, and against the odds I remembered it as if it had just happened, and every last detail, exactly as it was and just as he remembered it. There is no logical reason that I should have remembered any part of that perfect night. It should have been lost to me like so many other stolen memories. But I remembered every bit of it, and it is nothing short of miraculous. And so I wanted him to know that I was allowed to keep this one perfect memory against the odds, and after a quarter of a century it was an unlikely gift that the gods saw fit to let us remember in flawless detail together.
A perfect memory preserved in an obliterated mind, against all reason, and shared in absolute affectionate bliss. Sorry for the sap, but the way my beloved and I see it is nothing short of a miracle and a gift. So I had to write it for him, to show him I had one golden memory of our absolute love , and that because now it was written, nothing could ever take it from me. We have gone our separate ways, but our love for eachother remains as perfect as our memory of that glittering night a quarter of a century ago. And I thank the gods for letting me keep it. It is the one I would have chosen of them all. And when he realized it was not lost, his joy spilled out in tears of joy and disbelief.
So I'm aware that this poem is heavy on the sap, and that may make it weaker than it probably should be, and far too sentimental for some, but for the two of us who were hopelessly in love, it's a reminder of how perfect we were at 20, and it's nothing short of a gift to us both, and forgive me for saying so, but it is also nothing short of a goddamned miracle.
Forgive me for idealizing this particular 4th of July, but it deserved an ideal explanation in the opinion of myself and my ex. Thanks for reading my poem and our story.