Four Years Later

If you laid a transparency of then across now, there’d be no difference. The oak tree was infinitesimally taller. Knee high corn still grew in the muddy fields. The white house, with green slatted shutters, slept on a rise beside an identical lilac. Yellow pig stench choked the air. Even the girl smoking a ciggie with him was the same. College had not really happened. The demonstrations, and the wild blue moons, and the nights up until dawn accumulating debt. None of that was true. The shutters, the tree, the girl, the ciggie. Those were the facts. The other was fiction.