Distance, and not

[written for poetry class as an Ashberry imitation]

This was our ambition:
Find fulfillment between textbooks and videogames
And 3AM conversations online,
Communication was in characters and keystroke interactions
And then it was summer when you were face to face
With a tree. Computer screens morphed into clouds and back again.
Bytes flew at you in binary and grass spoke a different
language, antiquated beyond comprehension.
Dandelions waved at you with diffident indifference.
Their cousins were pulled and put in
Blue bottles next to the windowsill.
Didn’t we all look for some connection between moments
Plucked out of glassed over memories
Tied into a fraying quilt, patched, flowing through months?
Each new season, though, each time we were transplanted
From place to place, our world suddenly seemed
Like a whole new planet, and the last one
Became a painted backdrop in my skull.
Was it any less real? It was easy to wonder
If they actually did exist, or if they were
Figments in a fairy-tale imagination written in
Smoke smudges, a chain pulling the façade along the track
That changed at the close of every scene.
The images were bright, though.
My surroundings seemed to reinvent themselves
Every time I looked. Fascinating, no?
We pulled each other through our scenes
With black marks on white and that vertical line
Flashing behind blank walls of space yet to be filled
With our words. We were a group of people
Reaching out through wires to satirize what was
In front of us, condense our scenes into one, or
Maybe create one in common.
The summers were something to sail through.
Somehow summer just came to be friendship.
Somewhere down the line the backdrops, painted, remain.
Maybe they’re frozen but we look back and see them there,
Sometimes held together by the letters folded into gigabytes
Somewhere floating in cyberspace.
None of us ever graduates from college.
None of us ever leaves our individual summers,
Still in that room swapping jokes with uniforms
Rolled down and quick bursts of laughter.
The laughs are pulled out and maybe we are still—