On Wednesday I cleaned my hallway closet and I found the old album of scrap

Photos and miscellaneous magazine clippings

You used to keep

A box full of charcoal drawings and letters cryptically

written in Swedish

To family and friends still frozen and pickled on Akvavit in Stockholm

I wished I could understand the language

But the words stared back at me silent and apathetic

As if to mock my inability to decipher their import

I wish you had taken them with you

I wished I had not been so nostalgic and sentimental

Because

I thought I had long ago forgot

I thought the smell of you had long since faded from my memory

and before I had the chance to lift my shield of recovery

My mind splintered into a thousand small

fragmented windows through which shone your face

From every vantage point and place we visited together

or talked about visiting as we lay conversing and intertwining

our legs under comforters

And I was involuntarily transported to a page in the book

long ago, ripped from the spine

and dog-eared, and crumpled

Under the loose assumption that it had been discarded

I compellingly went through the box in its entirety

Photos, compact disc, and incomplete sketchings

Letters and scrap book contents

and in the end I remember what once was

Before reminding myself of what could have never been

Copyright ©2011 by j. k. Bradford, All Rights Reserved