It’s funny how memories and feelings start to slip away from disuse—at times a welcome loss… the absence of feeling allows for the disillusion that the soul is still intact. That it’s not actually rent and splayed… ragged from the shrapnel of leftover dreams and love that wasn’t quite enough. Forgetting is the whitewashing of the tomb. It allows one to move through life as if unscathed and anguish free. To walk among the daisies and pretend they aren’t being pushed up by the memories of love and loss buried beneath. But memories don’t take kindly to being strangled and put into graves. In rare and unsuspecting moments they resurrect themselves (were they ever really dead, or just lingering in the shadows of tombstones biding the time?). They pour in like a flood, overwhelming… threatening to drown an already fragile soul in their deluge. They leave me gasping for breath, clutching at my soul, trying to close the gaping wound found there. As if hands could mend what love could not.
One hand grips my soul in an illusion of defiance and strength. The other picks up a paintbrush and begins on the tomb.