It is harder to wake from memory than dreams. Some mornings sweated with a mourning for not another try but tide; the most blushing of happiness still biting with bided time. Perhaps where we find forgiveness, we release the most; we forget what it is to abstain--haphazardly whole for few moments before we restore our reprieve. It is golden, gripped by sunshine and shadows I can laugh back at, sear in the sun. But still tempted, still fat with hand-in-hand hollows; with the breathe of coffee; with strung, spandex above my ankles, with the the bellow of Stand Up America, a moon-shaped mirror of my adolescent self.
I do not even try to quell the wisps of time that extend their branches, their spearing, spoken quills into this present that is only mine. Instead, I fully embrace the foreign, human fact, that time is not linear--or rather, not unilinear. It is a space and spade of many lines, woven in wool across our eyes, bound or blinded on our wrists, velveteen, soft, sweated silk, metal shards and shapes that pierce us, that remain.
Even when we try to fish them out, to clear or clean, divulge the present or any presence that unsettles our calm, of any glance back into that glinting night of blackened sealife and the bluest forgiveness of my father's eyes. The scent of the floors, where my body could not breathe out my beating heart; blood and boredom; the pools of sunsets that once flooded my eyes.
To smile, in reference to this past, is to know not that I am unchanged; but rather, that my core is so recognizable, still so soft, perhaps shelled--at times--in a generous cynacism, but uncloaked from the red, from the blood, from the hood, still waiting; waiting with an edge, with an expectation that did not, in fact, drown in those biting tides.
