forgetting as holy amnesia

Happy Sunday,

My poem today begins with a question; and then another, and another, because lately I am less interested in certainty than in incision.

Sometimes I think we misunderstand time entirely - We treat it as something that passes, like weather, like traffic, like a phase we will outgrow if we just drink enough water and develop emotional maturity. We speak of ‘moving on’ as though the past politely packed its bags, snuck out the back door and left in an Uber.

But nothing I’ve lived has ever felt gone. Only altered. Absorbed. Like glitter you can’t quite suck out of the carpet of your nervous system.

This poem came from that suspicion; that moments don’t disappear, they embed. That memory is less relic and more organism. That love doesn’t end so much as change form, from blaze to residue, from hunger to ache.

I am no longer convinced that anything fleeting is actually fleeting - I think it stays.

---

Forgetting as Holy Amnesia

What if moments were not fleeting
but incisive;
fine instruments 
slipping between seconds,
lancing us open 
so time could see inside.

What if memories were not relics
but inhabitants;
lodged behind the sternum,
breathing 
when we are not paying attention,
rearranging the furniture of the self.

What if the past was not a corridor
we walked away from,
but a palimpsest;
each life written over, 
never erased,
ink bleeding 
stubbornly through skin.

What if forgetting was not failure
but a holy amnesia,
the mind loosening its hoard
of bright shrapnel and ruin,
granting the body clemency.

What if love did not end
but mutated;
from fire to residue,
from hunger to a low, 
mineral ache
that lives in the mouth 
of certain words.

And what if we are nothing more
than the afterimage 
of what touched us; 
creases where moments pressed too hard,
a cartography 
of wounds and wonders,
proof that time 
did not pass through us
but stayed,
                  learning the shape of our name.

---

Love,