ComeandGo(all that matters now is the bustle of the vacant)

It was a different life; the days filled with something warm and bittersweet --- something that slipped through my fingers: birthed, grown up, moved out and long gone before I even knew what it was.

There are memories that float like bubbles on strings; boistered by the breeze of familiarity, their cords cut by years and years piled on top of one another, their soapy forms all the more hazy and some even pop altogether—gone in a blink; the time it takes to kiss a cheek.

These memories are buildup—residue. Nothing more.

Certainly nothing less.

A residual energy in the abandoned space of my brain; the empty corridor where so many soft, warm, cinnamon-spiced sensations once passed back and forth, bumping into one another in the crowded hallway.

An empty hospital—a vacant street in New York City.

There’s none too many except for this one; this lonely little one that still possesses me and holds me close.

The echoes bounce off the vacated buildings that line this street; the doors with busted locks and graffiti sprayed like bold, insatiable youth and innocence and... naivety.

There is no such word sweeter.

It’s so simple to say these things in short sentences that rise and pop like soap bubbles, but it’s not so simply released.

It’s a thing to hold on to, a thing to lock hands with, a thing to travel down a vacant street with and listen to the echoes of the old and gone with; to smell the sweet spices of childhood that warms us in certain times of abandonment, and to remember that this abandonment has forever made you

complete.