I looked into my own future
and did not see you there.
It was not an accident,
I did not place you there.
I took every opportunity to leave.
I am that way.
I am content with my present,
a present I have built myself.
I do not love it.
I believe I deserve better than it.
My sight is blurred,
I manage, I compensate.
A future stitched
from fragments of this present
leaves me restless,
irritated by its familiarity.
This is a present
where I give everything away,
knowing
I will keep receiving.
A gift turned inward,
used against everyone,
gathering pieces of others
to string together something
I can call my own.
What am I to do with these gifts?
Am I not meant to play?
I do not remember learning how.
No one taught me.
And yet I taught myself,
or convinced myself I had to.
Still, I reach backward,
searching for the fathers,
the mothers of yesterday,
wondering
what they meant to give
that I never learned to hold.
I remember my memories fondly,
this, at least, is a choice.
Some feel borrowed,
as if I never truly lived them.
As if I had never seen a star
and only learned to describe one.
Others,
the people within them,
are no longer who they were.
Or perhaps
they never were.
Maybe I dreamed it all.
Maybe I chose not to fall.
Every day was once a mountain.
Now,
I have learned to walk.
But what of tomorrow?
What of the quiet weight
of nightmares
and unnamed sorrows?
What of this dreaming mind
that imagines a past
it never lived?
I was loved.
I believe that.
But I did not live much horror.
Only the kind
that grows quietly,
in absence,
in questions,
in the spaces
where something should have been.
I think I would like
to tell my stories.
A wife,
child,
perhaps they will do.
I want to meet more love,
more than I think
I am allowed.
So I will dress my skeletons.
I will parade them
for the world to see.
So there are no closets left
to haunt me.
Because it may all be a dream,
and if it is,
then let it be one
I no longer hide from.
Our Days & Futures 