Your Elephant, After All.

and while the others gasped when you called me an elephant,
I gazed at you with pride—as if you were mine, a lover armed with a compliment—
and understood that you were hailing my ability to seemingly hold memory tightly in the palm of my hand, knowing the nuances and ridges of time and past experiences.

and yet your rudimentary compliment was for surface things, silly memories of who won this and who wrote that; not for the deep things I could recall—
the scent of you when we first met, the ticklish way your arm gently brushed mine that time we stood next to each other.

and as I explained to the others that elephants always remember,
you now gazed at me with pride, only because you believed us to be merely intellectual and artistic equals and nothing more, and, boy, how I made your heart soar when I let you into the warm confines of my big brain—
even though I cared nothing about smarts and just wanted you, you, you.

but I was your elephant, wasn’t I?
bending to your will as I danced around the big top and took you back in time,
back to memory,
back to useless information.

and like they do, you took the memories of me and combined it with the memories of her and you fused it all together,
shiny and strong like ivory,
and you believed that it all came from one source (her),
and not solely from the poor elephant in the corner, bleeding and broken and bereft.

and yet, your elephant will find her way up and she will keep dancing.