memories

memories, fleeting visual feelings are forever lodged into my brain. rainy days, intense panic, waves of joy. some of them out of body, some altered by retelling, and others laced with subjectivity.

other memories are lodged deep, can’t be accessed as easily, they're so fleeting they need an anchor to bring them back. a picture, a word, a return of panic.

a revisit, a walk through the streets and thoughts you used to inhibit. a former version of yourself. each memory is a remembrance of a person who used to live, memory is a death. a wake for a person who has hurt less than the one travelling back in time.

a person less wary. a death of a person not exactly happy, but less encumbered by the damage their presence wrought on this world and other’s lives.

I mourn the person I no longer am, not that a previous me was better in the moral sense, but by virtue of living less had not experienced the different ways in which the world breaks your heart, shattering it so it’s impossible to put back together.

memories more dimmed. like inhabiting the streets and house of your childhood after-hours when everyone has abandoned the day but you’re still standing there. there is rising panic as I stand at the intersection of the street, the street I’ve turned on to the point that it is habit. the street where I walked holding my father’s hand, a street I didn’t dare walk alone. a street that is familiar but no longer remembers me, not who I am now. that overly familiar friend who knows a different person who you can no longer be. a panic that engulfs, you are no longer welcome. do we ever stop mourning the person we were?

memories are cruel in the truths they chose to tell.