on remembrance

You get to feeling like the edges of his bed are the far reaches of the universe. You can understand the shock people felt when sailors claimed the earth was round, that they wouldn’t fall to their death at the edge. You forget there is more. In the early mornings he breathes differently and you can nestle yourself into his back and pretend like time does not exist, and that if it does, it’s relative. You have slowed everything to a stand still, minutes are years or years are minutes. Everything takes on an amber hue. You get to feeling like living inside photographs that are sold in bins at antique stores of people you will never meet. They will never meet you.

We are all on the same level of obscurity. We try to forget that, mask it, manipulate ourselves into some form of forever. No one is remembered as they truly are. The few people in your lifetime that will ever truly know you in the early mornings will keep this memory of you close and safe and secret, and take it to their grave. There are moments of you, you will never know are memories for someone else. We appear as guests in others slideshows, as characters in their mind, of people they once knew and held dear. Have you ever thought of yourself as a ghost for someone else? How you might look cast in their past and amber hues? All we really leave behind, if we are lucky, are projections of the person they decided to think we were– cast against the walls as the sun comes up, frozen in photographs, tucked into the corners of time.