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#TWFT52 Prompt 34: The Word for This is "PAST"

  • The Word for This
  • Aug 25, 2019
  • 2 min read

Shift split rails that mark time, unravel

darkened fabric between

memories (threads abandoned

in favor of other weights

carried), travel back

to sand and shells, woven red

plastic baskets (these too have

space between)

punished by their

surroundings, and

tesser to a When

where safety is more than

a lesser of evils.


Are you able to explore the past?

What do you recall most strongly?

Have you suppressed good memories along with bad?


I always had the proverbial steel-trap mind and memory – but with it, twin powers of denial and repression, survival mechanisms that turned on me (as they often do) in recent years. I forget too many of the good parts.


Summer gets more extreme with every year, heat and humidity and poisoned air whose changing pressures I feel in every one of my misfiring nerve cells. And my skin… my skin remembers the shame of the exposure, every year dreading spring’s rising temperatures that force me to reveal more of myself than I want to show.


I grew up in a place where beaches and bodies of water were never more than a few miles away: the pebbled shore and Long Island Sound to the north, the chaotic bottleneck at the northeast where the ocean battles for right of way, the lengthy sweeps of sand, the Great South Bay giving way more seamlessly to the Atlantic in the opposite direction. Inlets and sandbars. Hermit crabs. Jellyfish. Sea grass. Sunburn.


And, the people I associate with water, the complex scents and tastes of the sea, the iconic family restaurant on the beach where I worked during busy seasons (as my son will do next year)… outposts of safety and simple acceptance I could never quite grab hold of, relationships I couldn’t sink into without being chastised for betrayal.


I only ever slept well after a day at the beach, on the water, floating, being lifted and set down and lifted and set down, over and over.

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