Footprints
When I was a little kid, I wanted to be an astronaut.
I read every book I could about space.
I learned there are footprints on the moon that will never be eroded.
With no wind and no rain, they have nothing
but sunlight to wear them away.
They could be there forever.
The last time I visited my grandmother, she didn’t remember my name
She wouldn’t hold my hand
She barely talked to me at all
Dementia’s velvet nothing had wiped me from her mind
like so much chalk after a lecture,
put out cigarettes on every family photo
But there are footprints on the moon that will never be eroded.
My father is almost 60
and already I can see the way his memory will hide from him
How he loses things
How he forgets.
How he will tell me the same stories about his high school friends
over and over and over
And how I let him,
Because their fingerprints are still pressed firmly into the skin of his heart
I’m not ready for him to hear those stories from me like they’re new,
Like the man he was is just another character
from the dime store novels he’d hide from my grandmother
Because there are footprints on the moon that will never be eroded
So I spend everything I’ve got on making myself a story worth telling
A character worth writing about
A moment worth the memory
There are footprints on the moon, and history still talks about the man who made them,
Hardly mentions the kids like my father
that pressed their noses to the TV to watch him do it
When my father forgets himself, who will remember him?
When he is gone like my grandmother, what will prove that he was ever here?
Sometimes, I stay up late just to get a little more moonlight on my skin,
To try and catch a little more of the reflection off those footprints in my teeth,
like that permanence could wear off on me,
could stop me from turning to the dust upon which greater men will leave their mark
People tell me to shoot for the moon like someone hasn’t beaten me to it,
like my footprints aren’t in the sand of a beach on a planet
with two high tides a day
I crashed my car last year and the guardrail was replaced within the month
This world is eager to erase me
But there are footprints on the moon that will never be eroded
and maybe that’s why I always wanted to be an astronaut
maybe that’s why I run around leaving my tread marks everywhere I can
Because maybe if I press my fingers into enough hearts,
write enough stories,
Maybe if I leave enough parts of myself lying around
then maybe when dementia comes marching around my body
looking at my skull like the walls of Jericho
There’ll be something left to prove I was here.
