Sunshine and Dust

The best writers have childhoods
where I have an empty jar,
weighty but translucent.

Others are chock full of candied sweets,
warm echoes of toffee and butterscotch,
or stuffed with silk from old dresses, or
scuttling with spiders and webs of dreams.

I am rattled with memories of memories only,
all significance lost in glassy reflections.
A decade or two of peace and prosperity,
of nights spent reading by the light in the hall.

Untrained to remember pain or beauty,
to freeze it and bundle it and
lock it down below my ribs,
I'm a cacophony of senses, of unbidden
traces of rotting leaf smell, of being mesmerized
by the fullness of the moon, of a deep abiding
expectation, quests never undertaken.

Left over, I'm a pillar of waiting, a testament
to trepidation and indecision. Maybe once full,
now I empty out, spilling dates and names,
realizing that I no longer remember
a word my grandmother said,
how the sky looked on the days of funerals,
the birthday of my first love.

A six year old girl remarks to me,
longingly, with big eyes,
"Oh, how time goes by!"
I grin at her tiny hands.

So my jar sits on the windowsill
holding little -
nothing but sunshine and dust.
Empty, I can see the world through it:
distorted, uncertain, and bright.