At the recent meeting of my local writers group, we were provided with the word remembering as a writing prompt. Sometimes just one word can bring a whole emotional outpouring from my pen… so here we go.
I think I can still picture your face.
It’s getting hazier though.
I will always recognise your smiling eyes in the many photos pasted and stuck within the brown paper album; a note jotted beside the picture of you proudly standing beside a fattened sow “Balmoral show ‘96”.
Yet when I close my eyes, it’s like I’m trying to look through frosted glass. The outline and silhouette tells me it’s you but I can’t picture the detail of your face. I can’t see the dimple in your chin or make out sideburns that, as a child, I spent many an evening studying and combing, and occasionally tangling them within the red curling brush.
No matter how hard I try, the details continue to fade unless provoked, and behind my closed eyes your memory is a simple shadow.
I heard your voice on an old video tape documenting Christmases past, adorned with too much tinsel and colourful fairy lights. No themes or matching decorations, just a simple chaos of colour and love. It brought me back to bedtime stories and nursery rhymes, peacefully falling asleep to your comforting voice reciting “I see the moon and the moon sees me”. Yet on my own, in a now silent kitchen with no spuds on the boil or tinkling of teacups, I don’t think I can hear you anymore. No matter how much I yearn to be comforted by your singsong conversations, your voice is now only the disconnected audio on an old VHS.
As the years roll on, the memories of you grow stronger, held closer to my heart with each day that passes.
But remembering you is becoming almost as difficult as missing you.
Wee Bubble of Books 