I leave pieces of me everywhere I go; molecules connected to the places I once was, was loved, and even some to those places I never want to see again. Some are locations I can no longer go, lost to time and tide, like keys to a door I can no longer access as the locks have changed, preventing me from revisiting where I once played, breathed and dreamed. A past I was too young to recognize as swift and fleeting.
I can't help but wonder of those pieces of me left behind. Do they quietly watch the passage of time, noting the changing seasons and years passing but wishing I could return, and if I did, would they even recognize me as the person I am now?
How strange to picture the breaths I exhaled and the pieces of my heart left sprinkled across the landscape of my life. Are those very breaths still being carried on the wind? If I searched would I find my heart and flesh embedded into the very soil I loved and trod across barefoot as a child?
Are traces of my heart buried in the sediment and layered in time like some ossified skeleton of ancient beasts for a future scholar to find? And what must that stranger think, breathng in the breaths of me through time?
Are these scents that trigger a memory merely the adult I am now rebreathing past exhalations, holding them warm and fluttering within my chest to wrap me in nostalgia like a forgotten but much-loved comfortable sweater?
What a Pandora's box of desire to wish these keys that invisibly tie me to my past, present and future cannot be taken from a pocket and used whenever I would like. To take a peek at what will inevitably become my past or to linger in a distant memory of splashing through puddles and bathing in the scent of a long-forgotten storm stirring in the wind and making the trees shiver and sigh.
But then those keys that would open up old dreams also lead to the nightmares that are best left buried in the moments they belong, no longer haunting me with the pain they inflicted and the ghost of old torments, like a spiderweb touching your face as you stumble in the dark. Can you really have one without the other? Likely not.
So here I sit in quiet reflection as a treasured moment of time caught up with me, marveling at its clarity, though I am sure that the golden edges rimming them now were not present at the time they were formed.
Maybe keys are not needed after all...especially if they keep the hurt at bay.
Its the dilemna, isn't it: if you give a mouse a cookie? Well, if you hand this girl a set of keys please be sure to have them carefully labelled or provide a map.
There is too much idle curiosity in me to resist taking a peek and getting caught in the mire as it all escapes across the scattered landscape. possibly to be lost forever.
Is there some ancient bloodhound who can track the course of my time upon this earth, snuffling its way from memory to memory? Perhaps he can pause in his course puzzling out what caused yet another piece of my heart to be left behind or so many tears to fall and help to collect the tangled remains.
