What Matters (prompt)
.
Some people. Everyone. No one.
I cannot choose just one without abandoning the rest.
Like when I was seven and prayed every night,
blowing a kiss to every dead person and animal I knew.
A great-uncle I could barely remember. My grandparents’ housekeeper.
A hermit crab. I could not let even one fall into the canyon
of forgetting. Eleven kisses every night,
before I stopped praying in 7th grade.
.
7th grade. My first journal. My letters to nobody,
to you. You, from obsession to long-distance lover
to ex to lover to long-distance lover to ex to nobody.
I cannot count all of the people you have been.
It has been four years of nobody. I am terrified
of when you will have been nobody for longer
than you were anything else. Letters to myself,
myself, present, future. They are in a drawer
in my room in Pennsylvania. Every year
I read one written by the self two years younger.
I haven’t stopped writing your name.
.
Memory, but maybe not. I know these stories change
every time we cast our nets in the oceans within us.
They gasp like fish as we break the surface with them,
their colors fading before our eyes.
It is a futile science, taking those moments
out of their homes within us, scrutinizing them
as they wriggle and change in our desperate hands.
No wonder the ocean paralyzes us with resonance,
as if we are seeing in its depths everyone
we loved enough to name. Memory as a circle,
as I blow your house a kiss when I drive by.
Right now, this matters.