When the darkness of the funeral had lifted,
I was still stuck in the gray of consequences.
She'd held my hand once.
Or many times since.
And I can only remember her words,
Her ideas, her dreams;
Everything she wanted but could never hold.
She was prone to overdoing it.
Everything she ever wanted,
In one small moment until it
Started to kill her.
And instead, I sit here in anger,
Not sadness, wishing she could have
Learned her lesson.
The sun peaks out from behind the dingy clouds,
And I pray for it to go away.
The brightness stings as the tears leap from my eyes.
I remember everything backwards.
I stood before her plot,
Hands dirty from the handful of dirt
I threw upon her casket to help bury her.
That one handful of dirty, cleaner than my soul,
Cleaner than my spotty memory…
I remember everything wrong.
They tell me I'm the backwards one.
Her laughter echoes in my ears.
I do not want to hear it.
I want to shut myself away from it all.
And while I'm at it, I want to shut out the color,
I want to shut out the music, I want to shut out
The beautiful smells, so that nothing ever again can penetrate.
I remember.
The way she dove into my words,
Proclaiming them genius,
The words any author wants to hear.
And I remember the laughter
Which stings worse than the memory of her
Suffering in a hospice.
I brush it all away, in a fit of vomit and spite.
Because there was something about her,
And I can't figure it out because I remember
Everything.
Backwards.