Will I Just Be A Stranger In My Own Memory?
One day, you will not remember me.
Not truly. Not the taste of my breath,
Nor the way anxiety settles in my gut.
Not the quiet, aching need I carry
Just to matter.
You may recall what I did,
The work I gave my hands to,
The things I loved,
Perhaps even who I held,
And for how long.
But you will not know
What it felt like to be inside my skin.
Nor what it cost everyday
To become you.
You’ll call me your youth.
You’ll say, “When I was younger…”
As though I were a room
You once passed through on your way elsewhere.
The life I live now,
With all its ache and joys,
Its sacred ordinary,
Will become, to you,
Just a story you might one day tell.
And I wonder…
When you pass a mirror,
Will I glance back?
Will some trace of me survive
In the way you stand, or fidget,
Or let your fingers curl when you’re tired?
Do I matter to you at all?
Not as a chapter.
Not as a stepping-stone.
But as a person.
Because I am now experiencing
The very things that you will forget.
I am creating the memories you no longer feel.
I cry for us.
I laugh for us.
I try my fucking hardest for us.
Even if you think you’ve fallen short,
I fucking tried man.
I gave everything I had
To get you to wherever you are.
I shaped you.
I bent and broke and bled and tore
To make you.
And I did it knowing full well
You would leave me behind
Without even knowing I was there.
And here is the truth that sickens me:
I know you’ll forget me
Because I’ve already done it too.
To the boy who wept into his pillow for years.
To the one who begged God
Just to make the pain go away.
He was so small and he was in so much pain.
He was so scared and he was so alone.
And now?
I don’t even know who he is.
He is a stranger that built my house
And then he vanished as I moved in,
And I never got to thank him.
I never got to meet him.
And now, his existence, for all the agony
That boy went through, has become little more
Than a passing thought I have sometimes,
Or something I bury deep in my mind.
So I ask you:
What am I to you?
Will I be to you, what that little boy
Is to us?
Each second that goes by, the person I was
In that second dies. It’s so gradual I don’t
Even know to think about it. Or to mourn them.
Will you think kindly of me?
Or will I be nothing more
Than a thought that you’ve buried
And very rarely even think about?
Will my existence today be nothing more
than you writing a line in your journal?
Do you still even keep a journal?
Or am I less than that?
Or worse, for how hard I’m trying now,
Will I be a regret?
If so, at least you’ll know I existed.
But I doubt I’ll even be that.
If there is still a part of you that listens,
However faint,
Then hear this: I was here.
And I am trying.
I’m trying so hard to be a good man, it hurts.
And I am paying the price
For every comfort you now wear
But I know it goes both ways.
For everything I do or don’t do now,
I know you’ll pay the price for those choices too.
So when you’re looking at the house I built you,
Wondering where the garden came from,
When you have forgotten me entirely,
As you must, as we all do,
Please. I beg you,
Don’t know me gently.
