January 18, 2022 - Memory

We sort through the wreckage, searching for something salvageable between the pieces of what is left. Any relic. Any artifact. A fossil. Any thing to prove to us that what had once stood tall and looming—a monument to a love we thought we’d owned—had actually been real. Our hands gone stiff with cold, knuckles scraping against the memories of what was, each point of view superfluous to the true story of what was us—his, hers, mine, yours. Each truth as unique as a thumbprint, distracted and distorted in its own way. But truth is truth regardless of what you say. The ruin and rubble around us, a collection of reminders, recollections of what might have been so imperfectly perfect…

…if only.

Are memories such favors? We’ll always have Paris, but we’ll never have Paris again.

Sometimes, I can see my breath in your embrace, but even in the cold, I fall into you for the memory of warmth. Between the cold sheets of a bed that once burned, I crawl next to you, corpse to corpse, for the memory of living.

And my bed time story starts like this:

Once upon a time, we carved our name in stone, then we lit the fuse and watched the mother fucker explode.

You can’t unbreak the broken.