no photo

The day grinds on, all gasp and hush, all spill and greed. The sky is staggered sun and clouds, blue and white and all manner of yellow muddling through heaven. The light still knows the feel of your skin. The night still cups its hands to gather your tears. This I know, though I can not prove it. This I know by way of bone and blood and clumsy memory, the truth so seldom held until it has been abandoned.

You took the pictures, you kept the proof. Together, then apart. Forever, then never again. There were letters, there were witnesses. Not one thing, no one soul to trust. We all inherit our failings along with our virtues. Eventually there is no way to distinguish one from the other. The villain proves the victim, the saint proves only another beast. All our history reverse engineered from how it ends. Even gone all these decades you paint the scenery with your improvident absence. Even without you here, you drown the day.

I have been cursed and reviled, attacked and endured and finally forgotten. Everybody gets to be Ozymandias over time. My effigy burned in ashtray and photographic ash, the very idea of me a fury in your heart. I could never have replied in kind. You are tattooed on the inside of my eyes, you are stitched into the shadows beneath my skin. There is no photo to remind that I can not forget. There is no switch to flip that can turn off this light.