XI

Within a few days
seeped into my universe
three lives that I could once have lived.
First, an unnamed number rang.
From the other side, places opened up,
that I had left even before you.
Then a sentence lit up in the old thread.
It reached me late,
like the light of a star
that doesn't know I've changed my sky.
In the end, we passed each other in the subway,
each on a different escalator.
For a few seconds between us
an open gap remained.
I waved.
I don't know whether at him,
or the men,
I could have become.
Perhaps over the course of a few months
walked through the throat of a wormhole
and returned to the same city
in another universe.
The streets have the same names.
The doors lead to the same houses.
Only time runs differently here.
On their side, perhaps
just a few nights.
Meanwhile, the sea inside me grew cold,
a new mainland rose
and the constellations shifted their position.
That's why they are still looking for me
at the coordinates,
on which I am no longer.
In one of the secondary worlds
I may have accepted an offer,
opened an old chat,
stepped onto a foreign staircase
and let myself be carried back.
Maybe I am still sitting there
over a glass of wine
and thinking
that I made a free choice.
But these worlds reach down here
only as a signal glitch,
a brief overexposure of the image,
a strange voice on the phone,
who remembers my name,
even though I have already forgotten his.
How many universes must be created
for a person to realize
which one they no longer want to live in?
On the opposite escalator
that face grew smaller,
until the station ceiling swallowed it up.
In this universe
I continued home.