Requiem to the Lost Self

The self I was

walks ahead of me still...

a faint silhouette on the road,

pausing sometimes

looking back -

waiting for me to catch up.

But I don’t. I cannot.

The old self runs miles ahead

because the path between us

has been filled with years,

with choices,

with the quiet erosion

that living demands.

.....

I remember who i once was

the life of which i dreamed

of conquering mountains...

oh, how i wanted to win it all

to dance...drunk with victory

............be the belle

now life finds me jaded - lost - fading

now i am become...just a memory

worn-out, extinct

a parchment of old manuscripts

stored in dusty old libraries of the self

i've stopped searching for secret recipes

and magical potions for winning

those which one prepared from a multitude of herbs

and spiritual elixir

i once thought that drinking such things

could save me from the shriveled up and barren

wasteland of feeling left behind

that maybe i could be revived

but i have not found that elusive fountain of youth.

Ah, to drink of divinity

become immortal... envision forever

what a crock that turned out to be...its all a myth

mountains now seem unclimbable

i pant just glaring up at the summit

one foothold is all i need

where to begin...

There was a time

i knew that earlier self

by heart...

the laughter,

the hungers,

the unbroken faith residing

in the shape of tomorrow.

I wore them

like a second skin. ..trusted their certainty.

I believed the dreams were my inheritance.

And then,

without ceremony,

everything slipped away...

dissolving into the sediment

of everything I survived.

So this is the requiem:

for a version of me

that could not walk

the rest of the way.

May the memories

be a soft lantern

and not a chain.

May their absence

teach me tenderness

instead of regret.

May I honor

what they carried

so i would not have to.

And if I listen~~~

in the quiet pulses between,

in the moments when the world

stops demanding my full attention...

i may hear them again.

Not calling me back,

but blessing my steps

as I go forward

into the self. For truly~~~

I are still arriving.