Written by: Wonga Tsalupondo
I knew this day would come
It just didn’t dawn on me that it would be this soon
Now that you’ve dwindled to almost nothing,
So much that you can’t remember your name,
To the point that you create faux and farce memories, I don’t know what to do with you (but love you)
I thought I’d be prepared, but that’s a lie I’ve mused myself with, until now.
Sometimes, I pray that you’d remember my face,
But time robbed me of that precious light you once had when I walked in a room,
Everyday goes by and you look at me with fogged, void eyes, vacant with affection or excitement;
You look at me as the stranger that I once was at some point in your life.
This troubles me; it upsets me, it hurts, deeply.
I pine away as I desperately lust for our younger days – maybe
I could marry them or wish upon them the same way Dorian Gray did upon his portrait.
To live and love forever young.
But gone is our youth, faster than a mischievous man, and you smile wickedly as if it thrills you.
I used to watch you: seated in that same raggedy old couch of yours,
With a probed arm you would bury your face in a plethora of words
That would transport you to worlds that could only be imagined.
You would seem frozen and catatonic, as if you weren’t human at all,
Until you would thaw out at an end of a chapter.
Those moments… were they perhaps some foretelling of your fate?
Here we are now in our so-called golden years
I guess for folks like us it is indeed our golden years, as our kind of love often falls on hands of perils
Yet here is ours so stubborn it’s a candle flame gyrating in wild wind,
Although our memories are as fragile as cheap wood.
I may not know what comes next, or what follows after, but I do know that tomorrow is my turn… and I’ve made peace with that realization, as I’ve lived a full life of love with you.
I just hope that that love will be a good-enough souvenir when I slip into oblivion, too.
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