And we collect trinkets our whole lives,
this’s and that’s—so much useless stuff,
scraps of memory designed to hold the moment now long gone,
and it doesn’t matter in the end, when others sift through the detritus of a life, not valuing what you valued,
only seeing your treasures as burdens.
The literary wealth of a Dickinson stuffed in an overlooked drawer is an anomaly at best, when most treasured things will have been treasured by us alone.
So maybe the time, money, and affection was misspent after all. And maybe these carnal things are, and have always been, the chains that bind us to this decaying corpse when we were made to
fly. If
I could go back, would I live differently? . . . Perhaps,
but maybe not,
because the closer you reach the end, the clearer the vision, and
the nearer the transition to realized eternity, the more open the hands.
I guess it’s just the way of things.
