Dear Reader,
Sense memory is a powerful phenomenon. It’s that moment when a singular sight, smell, sound, taste, or touch instantly transports you back to a time you thought you’d forgotten. All the emotions come rushing back, and at that moment, you feel them all again, as if you weren’t years removed from that person or place haunting your memory.
Of course, these emotions are shadows, vague impressions from the life we left behind. But despite this, they still manage to invoke powerful responses in us. Inviting us to consider what could’ve been if our lives had turned out differently. While this might invoke in some of us a sense of regret, it’s also an opportunity to recognize the life we have now and to be reminded afresh that all we have is today.
We often think that to legitimize the present, we must invalidate the past, but that isn’t always the case. Looking back fondly, we can thank those people and places that shaped us while acknowledging that life has moved on and we are now quite different. Like an old friend we haven’t seen in some time, we greet these memories with a wave, smiling to ourselves as we remember the beautiful and the bitter, but ultimately moving on and into the life we have today.
This poem, Park Bench, attempts to capture that experience—the speaker reminiscing on lost love as he sits down on a park bench, and all his memories come flooding back.
Enjoy!
PARK BENCH Whenever I see a park bench I think back to the moment we met, the kiss we shared beneath the sunset and how we whispered goodbye and went out separate ways. Now, all these years later, with none of the love we shared, I sit on this park bench and remember that awkward first kiss loaded with promise and expectation, thinking: what a life we would’ve had sitting on this park bench in the twilight of our years (a future confined to chipped paint and rough grain)— beneath my hand, the place we carved our names, foolishly believing that letters etched in wood could at last outlast the rain.