#afterimage - Hello Poetry

I The mind is a palimpsest of softened ink, where names once carved in graphite authority now blur into sedimented syllables. I try to retrieve her face, my middle-school best friend, but memory returns it as negative space, a photograph overexposed by time, light eating the edges of her laughter. II There are rooms inside me I no longer possess the keys for. In one, my mother is folding sunlight into laundry. In another, my voice is smaller, unlearning how to apologize for existing. I walk through these chambers like a curator of abandoned exhibitions, hands hovering over glass displays that contain only the impression of objects. III What remains is not recall but its residue: a tremor of familiarity when certain words pass through air, a scent that insists it knew me first, a street corner that refuses to confirm my history. Even joy arrives mislabeled, filed under something I cannot access. IV I make new days with meticulous devotion, stacking them like translucent pages, but the earlier volumes have begun to unbind themselves from the spine of my remembering. And I grieve not only what is lost, but the shape of loss itself, how it changes me without permission. V Still, I am here collecting fragments of a self that keeps slipping its own archive. If I cannot remember everything, then I will become the quiet witness to what remains anyway. VI Somewhere in this erosion, I hope she is still intact, my friend with a name I can almost hear, standing in a season I cannot revisit but still somehow miss.

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May 11

May 11, 2026 at 11:07 PM UTC

poetriesgrave

Index of What I Can No Longer Hold

I The mind is a palimpsest of softened ink, where names once carved in graphite authority now blur into sedimented syllables. I try to retrieve her face, my middle-school best friend, but memory returns it as negative space, a photograph overexposed by time, light eating the edges of her laughter. II There are rooms inside me I no longer possess the keys for. In one, my mother is folding sunlight into laundry. In another, my voice is smaller, unlearning how to apologize for existing. I walk through these chambers like a curator of abandoned exhibitions, hands hovering over glass displays that contain only the impression of objects. III What remains is not recall but its residue: a tremor of familiarity when certain words pass through air, a scent that insists it knew me first, a street corner that refuses to confirm my history. Even joy arrives mislabeled, filed under something I cannot access. IV I make new days with meticulous devotion, stacking them like translucent pages, but the earlier volumes have begun to unbind themselves from the spine of my remembering. And I grieve not only what is lost, but the shape of loss itself, how it changes me without permission. V Still, I am here collecting fragments of a self that keeps slipping its own archive. If I cannot remember everything, then I will become the quiet witness to what remains anyway. VI Somewhere in this erosion, I hope she is still intact, my friend with a name I can almost hear, standing in a season I cannot revisit but still somehow miss.