Archeology

Even now, years and years later—

it’s been so many years I’ve finally lost count—

I still feel surprise

slight shock

anguish

when I come across something of his,

something reminiscent of him

in my childhood bedroom.

I tried to do everything I could to erase him from it:

I scrubbed and painted the walls, stripped the blinds, hung curtains, gave his articles of clothing to people I did not know, burned the photos of him and I smiling happily on a hike at Roxyanne, smiling through gritted teeth on the kayak at Lost Creek, smiling vacantly at his sister’s house the day after Thanksgiving.

And yet.

I find a note he wrote me once on a ripped piece of paper torn out of a spiral notebook,

his version of a birthday card,

for a birthday I did not want to celebrate.

Folded up in thirds,

buried in the pages of an old favorite book,

hidden deep at the back of my bookshelf.

And my lungs tighten, my chest clenches, my heart closes up.

I am not in my room anymore.

I watch the past relive itself,

transported to that rainy night in March—

do you remember it? I think it was a Monday—

sitting in the front seat of his gold Camry in the elementary school parking lot down the street from his house.

He couldn’t look at me when he told me he loved me,

he would of course always love me but for him, that wasn’t enough anymore.

I suppose that's what everyone says, I've been told its what they all say.

That line has been slitting throats repeatedly, timelessly, cyclicly.

I couldn't even find solace in the isolation of heartbreak, I was not alone.

But it shattered me all the same.

A small snag in a disfigured scar,

an old wound and its phantom pain.

The ghost of our relationship haunting me—

why won’t you let me go?

My old room is a cemetery;

pieces of him, us,

a shadow of a self I don’t recognize,

entombed throughout.