The girl bit into her lips as she stepped onto the bus. No, not here, not now. She didn’t like those things that were forming in her eyes. Blinking hard, she rummaged through her bag for the yellow slip, a bus pass- to take her home so that she can cry. The writer pauses at these 0verly melodramatic words. When had she become this kind of writer? Je ne l’est comprends pas, the girl’s thoughts continued, paying no attention to the writer’s apparent deviation.These days, she doesn’t understand much. The writer acknowledges that perhaps she never did. The bus driver gives her a slight nod and the girl dutifully curls her lips up. That’s all she can manage right now.
I wish You had kept her happiness and not just the shape of her smile, that excitement and not just the tinted colors, and that rainbow in its wholeness, and that sorrow, that joy, that anger, that pain, that optimism.. I wish You, my lens, would keep something more than mere shreds of a world much too big for today and much too small to hold tomorrow.
.
What ever happens to twitters after one dies?
Can one still tweet from heaven?
Would God allow that much?
The last tweet remains frozen in time,
“I’m on my way there.”
She was on her way, it’s true,
but it simply wasn’t there.
.
I wish You had kept the way she talked and the reason for the sparkle in her eyes. I wish You could retain that warmth, in every one of her hugs. I wish You had treasured that feeling in our stomachs as we screamed our way down that roller coaster. And the taste of that Dippin’ Dots from that stall below the tracks.
.
Would facebooks be stored in time?
Or would They go through and say,
“She’s dead, let’s
close
her account.”
How about her phone number?
And the blog she once had?
.
I wish You could feel and take pictures of her person and not just her face. I wish I could touch this screen and hear her voice. That laugh and brilliant disposition- couldn’t You keep those too? But You didn’t and will not. You will never understand. This makes no difference to You, whether the smile is real or fake, whether the subject is dead or alive, whether that’s excitement or fear. You only trap saturated colors on salted plastics, layered in compounds but never in emotions. Merely shreds.
But I- I want the world.
.
A saved voicemail,
“Call me when you get this.
I need to ask you a question.
i Miss you!”
I said yes to her question but
it doesn’t know.
it simply doesn’t Understand.
How long will it be saved?
.
“A voice with bells- you’ll get the solo,”
I told her that first.
The video shows her singing,
but it doesn’t know that I pushed her
onto the stage.
How long will it remain in a black case?
How long will life remain rolled-up?
Round, round, round it goes. Where it stops,
nobody Knows.
My father is sleeping
on the bare wooden floor.
He hasn’t woken up though
we have visitors today.
Lots of them sit around my father;
their backs to the open door.
Why, I thought, did my father go to sleep
on this bare wooden floor
as his bed lies inside,
waiting for him?
Image from mhoye
ariyathe. 