Curtain Call | Absence | A Poem

Childhood is a loss that I mourn still.

The lack of overthinking and worrying.

I was convinced that disappearances would never occur.

I thought everybody was forever factual, their presence certain.

I expected their faces, their jokes, their wording and gestures

In every room that we lived in.

I relied on them staying.

I shoved the end towards the ending.

Forgot about it.

Ignored it.

I felt reassured that it was an impossibility.

I thought I knew the content of each head and body.

And I lived alongside the people I loved

Thinking that nothing would ever go wrong.

I trusted renewals, believed in repetitions.

Childhood is a memory that cannot hold still.

Everything is fleeting and I’d never have realised it.

It could have gone on and on in my mind.

I walk into the deserted rooms without names, without sounds,

All vanished, sold and repopulated, through memory,

I imagine what I lost, what I had and loved so passionately,

I evoke the voices, the missing pieces, the looks and laughter,

The non-existent bodies that were so close to mine,

The scent, the whiff of touch, of reminiscence, remembrance, love laying still,

All I have are distorted time travels in my imagination,

Memories holding on to a thread in a treasure box.