#inexcelsis

memories || accepting

          Forgetting something is like an itch, and when you can only half remember them it is like an itch you simply cannot scratch, or one which would be rude to scratch in public. She can only a little of the song, the words fading in and out of her memory as she tries desperately to catch them like falling flowers in fall, the blooms already dried and crushed to dust by the idle motion of the hand. But it has been so long since she heard HIS voice, the deep slightly off key baritone that even though the words no longer make sense to her, German so strange now that they numb her lips like the terrible cough medicine her mother forced her to take during the summer by the lake. Why could she remember the sheer bitterness as it stung her lips and throat, her mother chastising her for having washed her things in the evening as she should have done so much earlier in the day, an idle memory - a thousand others like it, but she couldn’t recall the song.

He would sing it in the garden wouldn’t he? Or perhaps in the chair by the fire. His deep voice rolling through the house as much a staple as the smell of food from the kitchens, or Val’s slightly nasally voice as he corrected her when they were children. She closes her eyes, trying to grasp a thread so thin it might have been the gossamer of a fairy’s wing, flitting wildly in her mind, as she sat tying to visualize her father’s face but all she sees is the portrait maman had made when they married, the cold eyes staring out at her. Weren’t his cheeks a little warmer? Wasn’t his nose bigger?

But in the place of his face is a blank space full of half remembered things, like the shop windows in winter time - covered with frost. You can see the light, but only silhouettes inside.