Landscapes

I miss those cold, quiet days when I was surrounded by a peace I never knew I had until now. By loving arms and thoughtful people and isolated connections and failed dreams, but dreams nonetheless. These days, they will come again, similar but not the same. Never the same. It pains me that they are gone, the days and the people and even the hated cold that could be described with every terrible adjective ever used to describe cold. I am torn between wanting to remember and wanting to forget. There are tiny artifacts which bring these memories to the surface, gentle hints, painless scars. I am not sure if these make me whole, or shred me apart... As if each note, each scent, each touch has been etched into me like those woodland designs displayed between wood panels at McDonald's and I am incessantly retracing the lines until I eventually split the panel in two. But still, as I try to retrace these outlines day after day in a desperate attempt to ensure their permanence, time like water and sand and wind and rain obscures and defaces these delicate lines and transforms them into pitiful suggestions of what once was, leaving in its unfeeling wake a disturbingly smooth and totally whole surface. I fight against obfuscation but to no avail - I guess we are landscapes too... but unlike our inorganic surroundings, we can remember our past. And all too often, I feel, it haunts us.