How Do You Leave It?

How Do You Leave It?

How can you let it go?
All the sights, sounds, smells, emotions
of a lifetime.
The people you have known and loved
and even the ones you didn't love
you remember them just the same.

The boxes and albums of yellowed photographs.
The treasured photos that you always meant to have
extra copies made
but didn't.

Many are photos so old that nobody but you
knows who the people are.
You always meant to go through and label them
but who has the time for that?

Memories.

The sunny days lying on your back watching the clouds
turn into ponies and fierce dragons and marshmallow men.
The smell of freshly turned dirt in the Spring and
The musky crackle of the leaves in Autumn.

Lying in bed on a cool Summer night
looking out the window and watching the lightning bugs
light up the trees outside and listening to the plaintive call
of the Whippoorwills.

All the Christmas Mornings and the Thanksgiving Dinners at
Grandma's house. The scary stuff on spooky streets at Halloween.
The excitement of moving to new places and meeting new people.
The sadness of leaving old friends behind.

All these are memories, some good, some not so good.
But they are you. They are what made you, You.
When the time comes what happens to all this accumulated
information, visions, emotions, knowledge, experiences.
Do they all just fade away?

Your best friend is your best friend until you are separated for a time.
Then you find they are no longer your best friend.
They have moved on.
You have moved on but have clung to the memory.

Friends are only friends as long as you stay in touch.
Otherwise they fade like yesterday's flowers.
I don't want to give my life up.
If reincarnation exists then I want to remember
this life in my next one.

I know that many people I know I have known before
It is in the way that you have a subconscious "knowing"
that tells you we know who we are.

But everything that has a beginning
also has an end.
Even though the end is just a new beginning.

I am the keeper of my family's history.
I'm the pack-rat that kept everything.
I have no children.
I am one of the last of my family's line
that started back in the late 1600s.

The rest are dead.

Who will keep the history?

Who even knows the history?

Who even cares?

Maybe it's best that the line ends here.

© Oct. 12, 2011 Philip G. DeLoach