CigarettesI breathe in the stale Reds as my grandfather’s head falls back in the ashen recliner, a lit cigarette resting in the corner of cracked lips, overrun with ash as it slowly smolders from blazing red to forgotten gray. The lit tip tilts, hovering undecidedly until it falls and singes his terrycloth robe, hissing like water on flame, beneath unblinking, vacant eyes, everlasting black, an oil-on-canvas Van Gogh. The echo of a voiceless laugh lingers, strained from years of cigarettes, wafting amidst the swirling remnants of smoke, his arm slumped over the armchair like a broken marionette while cracked time sits on his wrist near the tray of soiled cigs, fragments, whose lights no longer burn. BrokenLucy lies, broken, in her chipped wooden house. This little doll whose glassy eyes reflect my six-year-old self, features pronounced, distorted. Her plastic eye hangs limply by a single stitch on a wilting head, eternally slumped, a defeated daisy after a storm. This little doll who sits lifelessly in the tiny chair built by my brother, asymmetrical wooden legs attached with globs of Elmer’s like a real-life Picasso. This little doll who dazzled in homemade glittered gowns sewn by my mother, whose sequins have now dulled, ripped at the seams. This little doll who hosted parties with pitter-patters, doll feet dancing to Aqua and Alanis Morisette, the same cassettes that sold for two quarters, a yard sale selling memories. This little doll who sat with her little family in fixed, unfaltering contentment on the miniature scarlet sofa, once a rosy red, now shrouded in dust and imprinted with the weight of three small figures, an echo of what once was. Seashell ScarsThe nomad of the sands, discarded, abandoned, forgotten like stories of the past. Yellowed, molded by the hands of the sea, forever changed, scars across ivory skin, but still it wanders, searching amongst the sands and seas, a resilient warrior, bearing its wounded armor with pride as it shines brighter than even the diamond sands in all its broken beauty. A Life Well LivedI remember the times
from a life well lived of snorkeling and surfing waves in Kauai, crystal blue scuba diving in the Great Barrier Reef with dolphins and dugong of skydiving, wind chilling my face among flocks of gulls of journeys to old Europe Callanish Stones and vast green meadows with cragged castles beckoned by the London Eye traveling through a history book while indulging in bread pudding ears consuming sweet accents of old friends and champagne cheers laughter ensuing in Times Square at midnight dazzling lights of Les Misérables the echo of my grandmother’s words echo of my grandmother’s words that “every life is a journey, an unwritten book, waiting for its pages to be filled” as she passes on her adventures for me to take.
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