Where There Used to Be so Much There

Prose Poetry.

If you come close enough, really lean in, you might still be able to see it. Or feel it. And if you ask me I’ll give a bit of it to you, but only now in a faint way where you might question just how real it is. Like the sea sound you may or may not hear when you put your ear to the shell. But it’s a flicker and a shadow (simultaneously) of what it once was. Believe me. I’m the one who feels compelled to take the inventory of it every single day. I don’t miss it, but it’s still important to visit. Keep tabs. Some modicum of control even, if possible. And its somewhat newly minted quasi-quaintness is making me lose some of my spark — something I never thought I’d want until I finally accepted that not all flickers of light lead to positive things. That a single flint can’t last forever. My insides feel like a strip mine sometimes. I harvested so much of the sadness and gave it away mostly for free, and once it was no longer fully mine it stayed out in the open — became something anybody who cared to could see. It finally stretched farther than my own eyes, the sadness, and that made it lose some of its power over me. It can be better to be hollowed out than completely full. Because what can take the place of a void can be a scary series of things that come to set down roots where the sediment is mostly wrecked and devoid of any nutrients it might need to grow healthily. All this is to say, I guess, is that we’ll see what happens.