if you loved it, leave it behind

She walks across cracked sidewalk
back held straight and mussed up hair
striding through sunlight
ignoring the stares.

flashing green eyes
tell of journeys ahead
of places she's gone
of things that she's said.

but what is this place
she used to call home?
the people are hateful
the city's overgrown

so she tosses her hair
and lengthens her stride
who needs it here
with the cold and the snide?

she reaches the bus stop
it soon will depart
best to get out
while she still has a heart.

the then and now

The lights are a wash of color framing the windowpane, a fluid glow, insistent in the darkness. Chain of light comprised of light itself - it is impossible to sleep with this brilliance in front of me. That glass box of memories is bathed in a faint reflection of color, and the scene changes imperceptibly - a change felt rather than heard or seen, a change sensed because nothing has really changed but my own perception. I see the glass box differently, back when the memories weren't memories, but reality. Then the lights were blue 'round the windowpane; that hypnotic blue glow was an otherwordly luminescence, an allure, a pull, the utter impossibility of unconsciousness. I strain to see it, to feel it as it was then, to slip fully into the recesses of memory, but I am deflected against an invisible barrier, and the whole feeling is fleeting. Just a flicker of memory, a fragment. I look for all the fragments in the hope I can put them all together, join all the pieces, though I know I will always be looking. I stand in a place, immerse myself in years of familiarity, and come up with a single moment in a seemingly past life. Funny these fragments are so easy to relive but so hard to find. Funny they come back to me and it is as if I have known them all along. Strange but so, so beautiful, becoming a part of the place as to unexpectedly fall through it into the transverses of time, into the same place, so long ago, into the makings of a memory.