Lost in the aftermath of heartache.
Changes I did not ask for or want.
You are just a part of the change now.
I still  had pictures of us on the walls.
Held in with colored thumbtacks.
We were drinking flutes of champagne.
At a café by the Seine in Paris.
They are all pictures taken with Kodak film
from a lost long ago time.
But I kept them.
Even after you left me,
I still kept them.
Sometimes,
I pull out an old Vinyl album
Sinatra sings our song,
“The summer wind.”
I dance as though
you are close in my arms.
Yes I am drinking again
why the hell not.
One morning I was lay
at the bottom of the stairs.
A bottle of whisky
spilled all around me.
Our friends found me
They tore down
all my old pictures of us,
and ripped them into pieces.
I had been told you were remarried
to someone other than me.
I threw the torn pictures
into my fireplace.
And lit them using my whisky
as an accelerant.
It should have taught me a life lesson.
That holding onto the past is unhealthy.
But instead I burnt my hands
putting the fire out.
I was not ready
to let them burn to ashes.
Not quite now.
Not just yet.