We rarely remember life as it happened, only as it returns to us. These poems are the fragments that refused to drift away. Someday, they might.
sweep in, sweep out
There are people we think we have left behind, until a photograph, a hallway, a birthday, a familiar song, or a quiet afternoon reminds us that they never truly disappeared. They simply settled somewhere beneath us, waiting for the tide to return them to shore. Memory has a habit of doing that. It does not ask whether something deserves to be remembered—it simply arrives, carrying both the beautiful and the unbearable.
These poems were written through looking backward rather than trying to return. They are about classmates who became strangers, friends who quietly remained, friendships that dissolved before anyone admitted they were ending, childhoods that now fit inside a single room, loves that eventually became stories, and people whose names I still carry despite no longer carrying them in my life. Some of these pages offer gratitude. Others refuse forgiveness. Most simply acknowledge that every encounter leaves behind a version of ourselves that continues living somewhere in memory.
Perhaps that is all remembrance ever is: not a wish to relive the past, but an acceptance that it has never completely left us. Like the tide, it withdraws only to return again, bringing back fragments we thought had long been carried away. These poems are those fragments. I leave them here, not so they may remain, but so they may continue finding their way back whenever the sea decides it is time.
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