10.11.03----------------------------10.11.10

It's a quiet nod sort of a day. That's how my brother puts it & he couldn't have put it better.
It's only when Jpop reminds me that I'm forced to remind myself.
7 years & the chlorine lights have flickered & fizzled out; the death & disinfectant smell has faded.
7 years since I last held the hand that had so often held mine & wished in the yawning abyss between breaths that each one would be finally be her last, that she'd be free. Until finally, with ear-ringing silence, it was.
7 years & I've forgotten so much. With no present to unfurl into the future, all we have is the past accelerating away from us & dragging memory behind it; unraveling it, distorting it, pulling it thin & we forget.

We forget & it makes strangers out of mothers, lovers & friends. These are the ghosts that haunt us- the half-remembered details, the spaces we cannot fill. & they're only getting wider.


7 years & I've forgotten the sound of my mother's laugh, her smell & the way a smile broke across her lips (I wish I had a photo of her hands).  All I have are moments frozen in time, a fading photograph, a silent smile, the perfume of fixing solution & time.

But her fingerprints remain in the shape of my nose, or the way my eyes sometimes turn green & in who she taught me to be.  I hear the echo of her laughter in my brothers as we catch sight of the past & hold it for a moment & Remember.
& smile.