We woke up that Saturday morning to see
a bluebottle on the bookshelf, humming
loudly to itself as though it didn’t know we were listening,
the librarian with his dusty charges.

I envied him the peace he gained whilst working.
For us, when we worked, we were
always at each other’s throats:
we’d argue on the stairwell
about ignorance and bliss,
and then creep up to our own rooms and sit penning
love-mad poems to each other and
gorging ourselves on lemon cream tarts.

Then the three knocks that signalled recovery
and a slower pace of the heart;
the empty plates and sticky kisses
that speed the heart up again.

Those days were lemon-sour too;
they tacitly ignored the onset of autumn
and crept past us,
mimicking our library-stealth,
loyal in the pretence that we believed,
even admired: that these days were not finite.

We were blind to patterns
that weren’t in our world, and bought
items and utensils for the future,
cooking rich desserts that catered
to our eyes and not our stomachs, writing
our recipes down in between chapters of ourselves
and hiding them in shelves where only the observant
bluebottle could see them.