smudge

It hangs on you, heavy, like an old wool coat, tiresome in most seasons, but even more so in the summer. It isn’t something you can’t live with, but living without it is cumbersome and confining. You want to shed it like some thick, weary skin, long past its prime. Many times you have tried, scrubbed yourself raw to rid the memories, zombified your brain with mindless distraction, edged yourself further away, physically, geographically, hoping it would expedite the exorcism. Intuitively though, you know it will unravel and dissipate more unobviously, in slow motion, like the melting of snow or the turning of leaves. You hate being where you are, in the middle of the undoing, wishing only to be at the end, looking back with objectivity, with wounds healed, with armor unkinked. Even when it has rolled over on itself and come to rest out of sight, there is still the punishing task to forget, to erase all traces of it. Your end becomes the missing fragment; a part of you, hopeful, free and loving, gone, forever, used up in that moment for good, bad, indecent, broken. It can’t ever be returned, merely replaced with whatever happens to exist at the time.