souvenir

I keep things, this is why my room is a mess

Train tickets I bought to get to work

Pieces of paper on which grocery lists are written

Receipts from restaurants, movie tickets

Cards from friends and family

Coins from countries once visited

Envelopes with birthday wishes scrawled on them

Bo leaves, once green, now brown

Stones and seashells

I keep things, they clutter every surface in my room

And in boxes are all the things my grandmother made for me

Little crochet hearts and bags and pigs and squares

Orange, red, blue, purple, pink and green

Every chain so carefully stitched

I kept them all because these are things she left me

But today, I threw one away that had a stain on it

Burnt it before I could change my mind

A month ago, perhaps, I would have kept it

But today, out it went with a bag full of

Receipts and cards and pieces of paper and train tickets

Years ago, I threw away that one gift you gave me

I kept it with me, long after it stopped being of any use

But one day, when I was cleaning my room

I put it in with some other things in a garbage bag

It meant nothing to me, it has been so long since we last spoke

Recently, I was sorting through a box full of notebooks

Collected over the years, one of the perks of the job

They were taking up space and one has to be stingy with space

And love and happiness and other things

I flipped through the books in case there was something of value

And found myself looking for things I remember you writing

Doodles and words

All I could find was my own writing, barely legible, large, ugly, messy

I remember your writing being neat and small

But perhaps I'm wrong about this

I'm wrong about a lot of things these days

But in the trash those book too, went

And now, I feel like I'm one step closer to fully cleansing myself of you

There are journals I kept during those times

And truth be told, you make an appearance or two

But I can't seem to part with them

They remind me of times, not necessarily better

But definitely different

Strange because journals from more recent times

Notes taken down during therapy

They've all been thrown away

Funny, isn't it, how much distance there is between us

And yet how tied this memory of you is to me