Remember The Rain
The lawn has gone again.
Memories of rain torn apart by thunder. Faces faded, nearly disappearing, forgotten to be full. And lullabies wading through storm, as if softness could overpower colossus.
Driving on a street, splashed in misplaced sea, wondering if we should count the lines or the shrimp. But it wasn’t a Friday, it was someday, somewhere, a place I must have been, to be here drenching my mind.
Hopelessly nostalgic. Maybe it is all display. Some theatrical thought for me to replay over and over, hypnotizing myself to believe in its own certainty. Life happened here—it cannot be erased.
And yet, where is it?
Down waterslides and carpools it must have been slithering there, through all these things, wet and lurking. Too young to be independent but old enough to feel like that’s what you wanted.
Drowning in a lunchroom, tables and chairs upturned in the flood, clouds of mustard and soggy biscuits floating the airwaves beside my face.
I am barely there. Hovering. My legs swirl in the deep so my body stays unsubmerged, but I can barely breathe. I see bodies like lily-pads—motionless, complacent. They have all perished but I remain. Just a remainder.
All this talk of I—memory can be so narcissistic. Spaces which you cling to specialness, all for yourself, as if they had been spaces designed just so you could occupy them. Holy relics. Sacred secrets. They told you something they told no one else.
But that must be wrong. Because these spaces go on without me. But they are impressions, furious and sensual in my mind, touching me and cooling me off. Maybe I’m the only one who thinks they’re special—that’s why they let me remember them.
And yet, where are they?
Integration is a slow process. One mired by mires of placement. If I could classify every object I ever felt, every feeling I ever expressed, every motion I ever carried, would I come any closer to being fulfilled by leaving it all behind?
Maybe the weight would disintegrate. All the things which shaped me and defined me would be conditionally completed, and I could be reborn in layers of new and future me. Like the only thing holding me back this whole time were the times before this. But—they appear as fantasy now.
You cannot be stymied by imaginary obstacles. Especially those you made yourself.
But I am so sure my memories are real—they must be real, or else what good is the rest of me? What definition can I chain around my neck and submit to? Do I bathe in clarity or despair?
Liquids inside me turn more murkier by the minute. Until I am a swamp walking upright; a swamp thing being upstanding. Until I am the steps of a temple becoming reef, stone becoming coral, flesh becoming seaweed.
Still I hang my head. Forget the rain falling in my eyes. I was blind once—never again.
And yet, here I am.
