My earliest memories fell out with my baby teeth;
Leaving behind tooth aching fragments.
What used to be vivid,
Strong bone years ago,
Now contains cavities left to fill the empty with assumptions of the past.
The specifics are lost in translation, but I can recall only minor details of my childhood.
Yesterday’s vision is picture perfect compared to a ten year’s blurred image.
With focus applied, some of the pixels smooth out for a short breath of relief.
When the quality of our memory fails,
Where do our memories go?
At six years old we moved into my childhood home,
And I can’t envision how that looked.
Did my mom set up the kitchen exactly how she wanted?
There’s a faint memory of fake fruit along the ledge by the cabinets and beige and olive green dinner plates with fruit on them.
Did my dad have the perfect yard to his liking?
I remember the softest sight of wilderness, and we were one of the first houses in the start of the neighborhood.
My eyes have seen the same house for eighteen years, but my mind cannot dream of its beginning.
When I was ten years old there was a tragic nightmare I lived through.
We were playing softball with my dad’s best friend, and the game was down to a tie.
I remember the rocks in the gravel piercing my knees when I fell onto them.
My lungs refused to allow me to breathe
And my chest was in flames,
Burning my eyes in its destruction.
I can hear the sirens and cries from my family searching every inch of space for my lost baby cousin.
That dark night was the first night I wished I’d died instead of him.
All of my memories with the ones that I love have faded into one thread of gray.
On my lucky days,
I can hear a laugh and see a smile in my flashbacks.
The bad days have made me forget their voices entirely.
I dream in desperate attempts to get a lucky shot at seeing them again,
But would I know their faces?
Do our hearts remember all we love?
When the quality of our memories fail,
Where do our memories go?
Elyssa Latham (she/her) is a woman of words, and reader. Elyssa’s works express strong emotions that people go through and get the reader to feel those emotions alongside her. She wants readers to take away that it is okay to allow yourself to feel and that you can craft art out of pain.
Featured image by NordWood Themes on Unsplash.
