I’m starting to lose things I remembered already,

things you say I said

but I cannot recall

are sliding through my swinging doors

once tightly closed,

my drawers,

once believed to be preciously shut,

swinging open both ways

like the saloon doors

of an old western film,

letting in the good,

the bad

and the beautiful.

I used to think the past was like a room,

which would always remain accessible

but now I know that memories are worlds,

entire experiences

never meant to be revisited in any way,

except through the stubborn

backwards steps of the mind.

I look back there at my reflection

as if staring into someone elses eyes,

someone I may have known and left behind.

Left behind in tears maybe

Left behind in fear maybe

Left behind with laughter maybe

but nonetheless outgrown.

No womb is meant to hold a child forever.

With every letting go,

whether voluntary

or pried away by the fingers of time,

I am born and die

and born again.

Life never ends.

-ZG

After midnight

6/4/2014