Ghosts

Alba Mastromatteo, am696@uakron.edu 

Do you keep the corpses of flowers, their dry, brittle, muted petals laying in the shoe box on the top shelf of your closet? Do you hoard their skeletons as if keeping them forever will cement the memories attached to them into the fabric of time? Do you wait in anticipation until the flowers dry within their vases so you can add another species to your collection?

No? Well now I just feel stupid.

I look to my closet and see the shoebox I keep, a coffin. There are so many memories encased within. Each petal signifies a second of happiness in my life. I’m afraid to let even one of them go. It’s okay though because they will always be there, no longer a piece of fleeting nature but a shadow of that life permanently held within that box.

Maybe I like it that way, the ghosts of happiness in my closet, always available for me to mourn and worship. They are my own little protest against time because with them the past is never truly in the past. The past is forever imprinted into those dead petals; its memory is jotted down in the margins of my biology notes. 

My mind catalogs everything, often with such certainty that it inspires uncertainty. How can I be so sure of an event I didn’t take the time to burn into my retinas, imprint into the depths of my mind?