B. was seven years younger than me. Which means she’s fifty now. I can’t imagine her being fifty. The girl I knew—the young woman—was twenty-three when I wrote these poems for her. F. was thirty-eight. B. married a man even older than I was at the time, a man in his forties, a man she’d only met a handful of times. It was as close to an arranged marriage as I’ve encountered outside of an eastern religion. Her mother was the matchmaker and to this day can’t understand what she must’ve been thinking, what either of them must’ve been thinking. Carrie, of course, has twelve years on me and we’ve been together for twenty years now so it’s not so much the age thing that bothers me. It bothers me it wasn’t me and it could’ve been. I was about twenty-four when I came back into B.’s life but seventeen seemed very young to me then and by the time I noticed her for being more than a pretty girl I was already involved with F. The rest is history.