Let the dream play again, if you have a moment. Even if you’re busy,
take a seat. This memory is a placeholder. A homeroom, somewhere
you spend each blearyeyed high school morning; a point where two
loops converge. The spot where the CD always skips. The vacant convenience
store you passed by walking to school every morning;
tufts of weeds growing up through the crumbling concrete,
a faded Pepsi sign. And sometimes, I ask myself if
this is all there is left.
And it’s fucked up that these places make me sad, or at least achy,
like I took the wrong turn, a gnawing sense that
this world is not the right one, and at some point
I walked through the wrong door.
All these places, half formed, where I’ve
sat down, risen from, stared at.
Places that still infiltrate dreams.
Childhood bedroom,
divots in the green carpet,
a place that should have been safe
from terror
but that danger collapsed in on.
And I want to go back. I want to go
Back to my dorm room, I want to go back
to the house party where I met you, I want to
go back to Halifax and I want to go back and I want to
make these memories comforting.
I want to erase what really happened when the door
creaked open and the shadows bled in like an open wound.
Go back to the empty years and make them whole.
Go back to the forgotten days and fill them with meaning.
The days are the years and the years are the life. And
years are the stone upon the chest. The change I can’t handle.
🎸 Jonny Bolduc (@JONNYBOLDUC) is a poet from Lewiston, Maine. He teaches writing to seventh graders at a rural Maine middle school and is a devoted guardian to three cats.