It’s hard to know exactly when
memories that had meant so much,
shuffled and shifted in their files,
loosing their firm order and rank.

Dog-eared photos fading amber,
growing unrecognizable,
little be little, mockingly,
labels falling off and mixing.

Dusty and folded, coffee-stained,
they’re all still there, in the shoebox,
ill-maintained and so thread-bare worn,
but they are mine, and I want them.

Dry certainty drip-drains away,
siphoning tears of rueful doubt,
fearful, shameful, irrelevant,
I’ll lie and name it apathy.

                                -Still Here

Was I maudlin over our breakup? For a minute.

If I think of you now, it’s like a slideshow of unflattering images.

At the time, my breakup buddies reminded me you were a bad
choice - like a brand of deodorant that gave me a rash or fashionable shoes that chafed, even after they were stretched.

“Ruca,” my girlfriends would say, “you’re shootin-terrible, they’re a million pork-swords in the sea.”

Finally, I pulled the trigger - double-tapped us.

At first, reminders of you, those siren whispers of nostalgia, were everywhere - like the moon - which, I just had to live with.

You passed from memory though, that’s how memory works. Events fade, like last week’s chemistry test, or yesterday’s lunch.

Now, if someone asks me, “Hey, remember, what’s his name, your big love from high school?”
I say “Nope.”

I chose to laugh, dance - and shoot birds at the moon.

We picked up a rock one day
At the end of the road next to that orange sign
That always made you think that maybe they’d continue the road
If only someone cared enough to do it
We were young, like 16 or maybe 17 an age when we could feel the oncoming dread of life
But we hadn’t experienced it yet
We marveled at it for no other reason than it was the right kind of magnificent
In reality it was a pretty normal rock
We sat out at the end of the road for an hour and talked about what our lives would look like
The kids who would eventually fill our separate lives until they too left their suburbs behind
We always swore that we wouldn’t forget that day
It was too magical
But I have to confess to you
I forgot
I didn’t choose to forget it or do so in a rebellious act of growing up
Time passed and we got old
And there wasn’t really anything we could do about it
It was just another remnant of a childhood lived with other people
Before I knew the ones, I would choose to make a life with
And that memory would drown in a sea of clouding memories of my childhood with you
But then, today I found the rock
We carved our initials into it trying to make the moment last longer than we did
Our fleeting lives were nothing compared to the eons this little rock had seen
I thought about calling you up and asking
“You remember when we found this thing?  The orange sign, how we swore we would always remember it?”
But I didn’t
We haven’t talked in a while and even though you probably know me better than anyone else in my life
It still feels too personal
So I guess if you remember the rock sometimes too
Call me
I’m still here

its the last walk through memory lane
i have memories of you, of us
but no matter how hard i try to stalk those memories back
my memory doesn't seem to last forever