Bones From The Past

Time is slippery, it expands and contracts, it is determined by velocity, measured by ticking hands on a face. The span of souls is weighed in springs and cogs. Does the gray in my hair match my calendar, or does the calendar follow my fading?

I know I’ve aged. My favorite shirts are threadbare; my hands are my father’s. Everything is loose, including the hands on the face. They leap and convulse, counting things that hold meaning only through name. Seconds become minutes become hours become days, become weeks become months become years become decades… they all fall. Words like leaves. There is never a moment to pause and collect bearings. There is only ever the moment, built on the bones of the past.

I stand on a mountain of bones, polishing, adding more bones to the peak – pushing myself higher on dead memories. How many mountains hold parts of me? Whose memories do I haunt? Who sits upon my bleached bones?

The wind whistles. I pluck a skull from the pile. Skulls always smile. Bones don’t lie. I have a Hamlet moment, but no soliloquy comes. I let the skull fall, it makes a hollow sound, like the days, it tumbles, it rolls, still smiling, for a long time. It will be difficult to retrieve. I wonder what it was?

I am left staring at my hands. I wonder if my father misses them? He has my grandfather’s hands now. I know my grandfather doesn’t miss them. He died when I was six. That bone is near the bottom of the mountain, but it gleams.

If I have no son, will my hands cease to be? Will they become bones in metaphor and reality?

I sigh – always asking questions I can’t answer. I return to the task at hand. The latest bone is big and waiting to be picked clean. I don’t want it to rot.

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Tags:

bones, loss, memory and skull