Under Loose Assumptions

On Wednesday I cleaned my hallway closet and I found the old album of scrap
Photos and miscellaneous magazine clippings
You used to keep
A box full of charcoal drawings and letters cryptically
written in Swedish
To family and friends still frozen and pickled on Akvavit in Stockholm
I wished I could understand the language
But the words stared back at me silent and apathetic
As if to mock my inability to decipher their import
I wish you had taken them with you
I wished I had not been so nostalgic and sentimental
Because
I thought I had long ago forgot
I thought the smell of you had long since faded from my memory
and before I had the chance to lift my shield of recovery
My mind splintered into a thousand small
fragmented windows through which shone your face
From every vantage point and place we visited together
or talked about visiting as we lay conversing and intertwining
our legs under comforters
And I was involuntarily transported to a page in the book
long ago, ripped from the spine
and dog-eared, and crumpled
Under the loose assumption that it had been discarded
I compellingly went through the box in its entirety
Photos, compact disc, and incomplete sketchings
Letters and scrap book contents
and in the end I remember what once was
Before reminding myself of what could have never been
Copyright ©2011 by j. k. Bradford, All Rights Reserve