How to fold a memory
Our brains remember the infliction of pain via physical, psychological or emotional, we remember what is bad as in means to avoid it in the future, so let’s start at the beginning. I remember the shape my hand held while in yours like origami prayer, like flower petals returning home, i remember the rose petals, falling from your fingers, leading from the bedroom to the doorway, like a trail of breadcrumbs, or drops of blood, the scent of cinnamon, how you would sprinkle it into my coffee like fresh ground snowflakes, i can’t take cinnamon in my coffee without being hungry for your laughter, i am hungry for your laughter but my mouth tastes like the slow dissolved of the last i love you that refuse to leave it. Remember the river? How we danced to the sound of it rushing? How you hummed to radiohead in harmony? Well, that song haunts my house of cards, how i wish it would just collapse, how i wish i could forget how i got here, how did i get here? I was carried in the teeth of your charm, or i walked, i marched, i was a turning cheek parade, i wasn’t paying attention to the highlighted root, or the was no map and i just got lost, but with every journey back into our past it becomes harder to find our way there, our brains are constantly rewriting the path, rewriting what we remember, so let’s start at the end. It was by little sugar creak in the warm Kentucky breeze that we stood off unfolding in silence, in silence it’s impossible to tell what the other person is thinking without looking them in the eyes, and you would not look me in the eyes, so by little sugar creak i let the warm breeze reach you in place of my origami hands, and since i have been practicing forgetting, i’ve kissed the sky more times than i ever kissed you, i inhale purple haze in attempts to smoke out the correlation between you and the scent of cinnamon, i drink as if i’m trying to save the world from drowning, to get my memories so drunk they might forget themselves by morning, but the trauma of daydreaming, the curse of muscle memory, my body keeps your secrets, how do i teach my mouth to shake out the reflection of your etch-a-sketch smile?, my wrist to forget the arches and curves of your name? my ears to hear songs without the ghost of you inside of them? and worse, in the spasm of remembering i can not tell if my past keeps slipping into the present, or my present keeps slipping into the past, still my body wears your fingerprints like a home address. I loose memories like baby teeth, but you are a stubborn molar refusing to leave. we cannot control what we remember, but we can control how we remember, so i shake cinnamon into my coffee and i don’t think of you, i write your name over and over until it no longer holds any meaning, i fold my memories of you, craft them paper wings in hope they may one day drift away into amnesia and you may finally leave me without a trace.