Prologue
You look in the mirror and see your forehead doing its best impression of the Grand Canyon. Your body creaks now when you get up after sitting too long. You hear pop songs and realize they aren't being written for you anymore, even if you are still young enough to listen to them. You hear the music that was written for you on "classic rock" stations. The moments that scarred your generation are being taught in history classes. Last week can seem like an eternity ago, and ten years ago can feel like yesterday. You play the same songs, the same moments, again and again in your head because taking in new things is exhausting.
You wonder if you are alone because it is what you truly want or if you are too afraid of getting trapped. You spiral down into wherever your phone screen wishes to lead you today, only to wonder why you have let those precious seconds slip by unnoticed. You remember that a billion seconds is about 32 years, and Google tells you you crossed that threshold six months ago. You've built something in that time, but you can't help but feel like it should be bigger, grander, more sturdy. Perhaps it would have been if your brain wasn't so good at knocking it all down.
You find a box in the back of your closet that has been sitting there, forgotten in the chaos of moving and the challenges of existing in the four years since you moved. You open it and find old photos, old journals, old visions of who you were and what you might have been. You close it in a flash, but like Pandora, you are too late. Your past is back, demanding to be seen, to be understood, before it can be released.
~~~
I had a couple ideas kicking around for LMS-elegies of old friendships, letters to a soulmate who may or may not exist, musings on who I might have become if just one moment changed. But none of these feel compelling enough for a long project. My previous LMS project still has some additions that are needed, but those are already largely written and not extensive enough for me to want to continue it as a rogue. But these days, I'm largely preoccupied with getting older and the feeling I have settled into a life that is not quite right. And we all know how much I love processing things through bad poetry, so here we go.
Putting a 16+ rating on this because there will almost certainly be language and probably some darker themes. Individual poems will be tagged/spoilered accordingly.
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