Twenty years with someone can feel like five. Not because the years were short — because so many of them were the same.
We have two clocks. One runs while something is happening. The other runs backwards, in memory, and it doesn't count hours at all. It counts distinct things it had to store.
A week away vanishes while you are inside it, then stretches into something long when you look back. A month of ordinary Tuesdays does the opposite: slow to live through, then gone. Psychologists call it the holiday paradox. Routine gets filed as one memory rather than thirty.
Which means the years we have left with someone aren't fixed. They can be made longer by being made less alike.
And that is what a poem has always done — take one ordinary evening and write it down hard enough that it refuses to blur into the others.
Time together isn't measured in years. It's measured in the ones memory bothered to keep separately.