Coraline

  I forget things that should have stayed. Names. Words I once held like glass. Entire versions of myself I can’t quite reach anymore. Sometimes I read my own poems like they were written by someone I used to love or hate. And maybe they were. But memory isn’t gone. It waits. Locked. A smell. A song. A feeling sharp enough to split the surface. And suddenly everything comes back too much too loud too alive. So which one is mercy? To forget and walk lighter through a life you barely recognize or to remember and carry it all like a body that never learned how to rest? I have lived both. The highs that burn like I am more than human untouchable, unstoppable, a mind racing ahead of time. The lows gravity remembering me all at once. Dragging me down into something small. Something tired. Something afraid to exist. They say memory is power. But what kind of power comes with no control? What good is remembering if I can’t stop what comes next? So I wonder is forgetting a wound  or a ...

  You're all scars. And you're all light. You've got entire lifetimes  sleeping behind your eyes. You're fragile strange. You're dirty soft. You've got dead summers  resting in your throat. You're hollow full. You're silent loud. You've got my whole existence  in your skin all around. Coraline.

  I used to believe that things end because someone leaves,  or because time decides it has had enough, as if time were a judge,  as if departure were proof. as if endings were anything but a human convenience. But nothing truly ends. It only decoheres. States drift. Probabilities thin. What once interfered learns how to exist without touching. Every version of me that almost chose otherwise  still hums quietly in the background noise of days. Not alive. Not gone.  Just unresolved, like equations left unsolved,  not because they are wrong, but because no one needed their answer yet. I learned too late that observation is not innocent. To look is to interfere. And I kept looking. To remember is to collapse a thousand possible selves  into one narrative I can still carry. Memory is a measurement. Identity is a result I wake up inside. Meaning appears only after the wave has broken. Some systems never close. They leak traces, patterns, unfin...