I try to speak

Words fail

I try to understand

Words fail

I try to know what is in my mind

Memory fails

Yet 

do I want to remember?

I want to understand

I was young

Yet age is only a number

A seven-year-old doesn’t know 

A seven-year-old doesn’t understand

My age is doubled and I still ask why

Four years after I should have remembered

I watched someone strong

She stood up for herself

I should have remembered

Now I think

I can see now

What I should have done

But I can’t focus on the past

Place one foot in front of the other

Yet

The past haunts me

I see a face

Brown curls

It turns away

Like nothing happened

So nothing happened right?

I can’t lie to my memory

I know it happened

What if my memories lie to me

I can’t remember

They say I was young

They say it’s okay 

I didn’t understand

No. 

I shouldn’t have needed to understand

But I desperately needed too

Yet

I didn’t

We were young

I don’t know if that face understood

As it turned away 

I don’t know if that name understood

The name that makes me doubt what I remember

The name that is left unsaid

But everyone knows

My mind is a spiral of confusion

A whirlwind of doubt 

I want to move on

Leave the past to the past

Yet

The face as it turns away 

The thumbs hooked on that backpack strap

They haunt my mind 

They won’t disappear

For so long they were locked away

Deep down in the pit of my mind

That face

The curls

Those hands

I try to speak 

Words fail

I want to understand

But I only see

Pieces 

I want to understand 

I fall