I wish you could see the horizon
I see in you
a thousand burning suns
I see how you ache
to be different
to be honest
knowing when you do
that your trust
will be betrayed
you’re just sizing us up
to see
who will be the one
to break you
because you know
nobody can keep
promises for long.
Where I was dark I wanted you
to see the light
in me, I hoped for more
I thought I was better than this
but stripped bare,
maybe this is all
any of us is
just a joke
waiting for a punchline
that never comes.
When the air feels stale
The way it does
When someone
Has forgotten
To return
When instead
Their breath has chosen
To collect in all the corners
All the crevices
Of places
Of you
Recycling into your breath and out
It becomes a perfect little system
Until inevitably
it doesn’t work anymore
and has left you wondering
long after they’re gone
why their smell lingers
though none of the smoke
has survived.
She looked at them. These people with their echoing laughter, as though to taunt her. But she was old enough to know that they simply did not care about whether their laughter, their joviality would be taunting or not.
She wanted to be angry, but she didn’t even have the right, it felt like, to be angry with anyone.
There was a gap between how she felt long ago and how she felt now, and it seemed to be growing every day.
There was this aching need to be away from here.
As people spoke to her, as emails flooded her inbox, as voicemails accumulated on a phone she could not bring herself to answer, she didn’t know how to respond to any of it. Her mind was a dark chasm where the only light was escape from here.
FROM HERE. PLEASE.
She wanted to just be disappeared.
What would it be like, she wondered, to start over from ground zero, as if none of the years preceding and intervening had ever happened?
What would it feel like to be home again?
It’s alright.
It’s alright, love, to breathe in and breathe out. Forgive.
That word is so heavy on me though
That word is reserved for the both the worst and the most mundane of crimes
That word is a loaded gun
Nobody knows for sure what it means
“Forgive and forget” they say
“Forgive, but do not forget” they say
Which one is more forgiveness than the other?
Or are they the same?
How do we know when people deserve it?
Or does everything get so hard that we choose it
Only for ourselves?
Just to breathe easier again?
I have to learn to love
all the bad bits
of me
but how?
there’s something tragic
about forgetting
isn’t there?
when we spend hours
accumulating all these memories
of ourselves and other people
of moments
nuances
stories that make us
who we are
forgetting is not always
a breath we did not know
we had been holding in
sometimes forgetting hurts
stings when you go
to revisit a moment
only to have lost it
in time
the sting lingers
until
you forget it too
that’s how pieces of you
fall away
over the years
and even as I write this
I wonder
how much I’ve already
lost.
how do you pause, reset, and start it all over?
how do even those paths
emerging from the same root
divide and go their own way
determined to write their own story
even within the womb
none of us is ever the same
and from every waking moment
to the next
we are heartbeats only
our mothers remember
each of our paths
is its own
though we are all
flocking to a garden
somewhere else
if this is who you are
when you close your eyes
who are you
when you wake up?
nancyornot 