ars poetica est non omnia dicere.

it's so weird being here, again and again, slowly erasing the memory of all our old places, erasing the paths we trod - bravely, boldly, heedlessly. every christmas i just imagine your stupid shopping habits, which you've probably dropped by now - i walk down memory-lane shopping aisles, walk where we used to run on the 23rd finding gifts you didn't know you were going to get. i leave the church parking lot where the annual gift exchange rite often took place, and imagine that your car is right there. i walk in neighborhoods and along streets that i have only ever known through you, through your philosophizing, through your innocent-yet-suave wonderment. i've been reimagining my life of late, in directions you probably knew long before i. i've been reimagining my life free of the constraints that have held so fast for so long, free of the jury that asks me to name my soul differently. i reimagine all this freedom and i am ready to live into it, but i still i cannot escape
  the bittersweetness
    the sadness
      the mourning that never starts enough to stop
        the anger
          the longing
            the haunting
              the hollowing
of - if not a life together - then at least lives together. for the first time i imagine myself taking a path that you chose long ago, a path i dare remember nudging you towards so long ago. i imagine believing that there is some part of truth that i may yet have a hand in delivering, some beautiful idea whose time i must keep. but a part of my own truth i still cannot take back and probably will never own. for the truth of love, true love, is extra nos. we are seized, possessed, held by it, and while we are, we live - live a thousand moments or maybe just ten, but we live TRUE. then this truth lets us go we know not when, and in utter bewilderment and irration we stumble until we chance to be likewise seized again, to live again. 'come, christ,' we pray this eve and this morn, 'come into our world and our hearts and fill us joy and love!' but why cannot we pray 'go, christ, go! take away what i cannot, move what i cannot - the memory of love that let go. go, christ, go - as far as you need to roll the stone of memory away, far enough that love could possibly walk into the grave and pick up the scraps and plant them in a new eden of Adam and Steve's defiant I DO! I DO! I DO! I DO! and if I DO! long enough and loud enough, then maybe memory will shut up for just a minute, and for once, listen.

of course, i never was a poet.