The Things I Leave Behind

These are the things I leave behind.
Good memories, hard lessons.
Bonds, loves, people,
Joy and pain often as one.

The one with the silver soul.
It hurts as I pull and clings to my heart,
In a place of cherished memories.
And I sigh with loss as I watch it fade into the distance
Behind me on that road that carries me forward.

I must wrest it from my affections,
For the memory of what it was is far fonder
Than the reality of what it has become.
This I leave behind,
To be a memory that glistens with sweet nostalgia
And not a tragedy; A sorrow, to see the tarnish of age and abuse
On something I cherished for its purity.

These memories.
These are the things I leave behind.

Puzzled though I was,
I leaped at the chance to be seen by one as a companion.
The one with the golden voice, object of my admiration and rivalry.
A warm, wanting closet of my heart nurtured through all these years
A hope that I had had some worth to you at any point.
A small gesture now, since these long years have passed,
and now I realize the naïve romanticism of my remembrance,
The naivety of the hope I harbored that perhaps you had thought of me,
Fleetingly, in a kind and reminiscent way.
This thing… I release into the air from outstretched palm,
Belief in a thing that never even existed at all.

These thoughts.
These are the things I leave behind.


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Rose Erifnosi
12/17/2010

For all the ones I've left behind.