Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus
The speaker watches a former partner's new relationship from the outside and imagines the parallel life she might have had. The counterfactual is present tense and ongoing, she is watching someone else live the timeline she did not. 'Do you just not think about it?' is the haunting question at its centre.
“Can we watch our phantoms like watching wild horses?”
Phantoms carry a theatrical and cinematic register here, spectral figures observed at a remove, like projections on a screen. The simile of wild horses adds an untameable quality to these ghostly presences; memory figured as something feral and uncontainable.
“Will that make your memory fade from this scarlet maroon like it never happened?”
“Hands in the hair of somebody in darkness named Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus”
watching the phantoms you can't keep
“Can we watch our phantoms like watching wild horses?”
“Dancing phantoms on the terrace” — loml
Readers connect loml's "dancing phantoms on the terrace" to Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus, where the phantoms of a relationship are watched from a distance like wild horses — in both, the could-have-been is something glimpsed moving, never held.