I am asking you to be kind to me.
Let me remember.
Let me dream.
For however many months,
Don't let it fade.
I've read articles, I've researched for years
The mind, the logistics of memory.
I did it out of love.
I've explored it with the singular focus of a dying man
Scouring old books for evidence
Of the Fountain of Youth.

What can I do?
A certain perfume
Worn
To jog the brain and keep a memory in tact.
A gesture or a way to breathe
That brings you back to a lost moment,
A song or maybe
Just the deliberate reconstruction
By the detail
Of a beloved face in the air before you
Although you know it isn't there.

You can train your mind
To conjure ghosts.
And I have done so with mine, over years,
Even when it turns the talent on me viciously.
Am I toying with insanity
Inviting it in?
Perhaps.

Memories are gossamer, fragile,
Like paper so thin and pale and delicate
That you can see right through
And one touch of your fingers,
Even the lightest,
Powders them to silky dust.

I've sought relentlessly
Every trick and association,
Every scientific shortcut
To keep my treasured moments close.
I've touched, willfully, every detail of every second I can recall
Touched the smallest lines and angles and
The little places where the illusion wears thin
Unable to hold the potency of reality
Only its reflection.
I have made myself touch every single moment
That I know it would be easier to leave alone-
Memories are not meant to be so scrutinized.
The price of keeping them is the uncomfortable proximity
To something good which is long past
And the peculiar grief that it will never come again.

But there are things
There are people
In this world
Simply too important, too essential
To let go of.
There are memories
Worth the unsettling work of holding them.
There are moments
I would rather die than not relive.

Please,
I know you are more extraordinary than math equations and good grades
And pages and pages of poetry.
I know that with all of our hidden corners
And how little we know about our minds
You must have a way, you must have a gift for me,
You must have a chance to keep this close.
I am asking you to be what you are.
I am asking you to let me remember.
I am asking you to send me dreams and smiles
And to never let those blue eyes fade to the sepia of old memories
But to keep the vibrance that stops my heart
Alive in my head.