You Are a Memory

I am thinking of you in the cold December nights, hoping your memories would warm me in places the chill seemed to have taken a perpetual hold. I think of you with my palms running up and down my arms and knees pressed to my chest, souvenirs sinking in my skin with a warmth that I cannot explain. And yet, for all its tenderness, it is not a warmth that stays, fleeing as soon as my body unfolds and stills, ripping out of me just when I start to lean into its sudden familiarity, leaving behind a cold that does not belong to these December nights. This cold that stretches beyond seasons and time, occupying every last inch of me and reminding me that these memories are here because you are not, seeking to fill your absence but only amplifying it. And I am realizing that memories can barely get you warm enough until they turn into yearning. 
December nights are when I wait for you to fill the empty spaces you left and wake up shivering with sun streaming down my face, wondering why I cannot feel its warmth.

Fading in the Present

These days I find myself drifting into memories of my childhood.
I think of the way we used to fight for our places in our classrooms, claiming them ours as though that part of the world belonged to us, our names etched in the corner of our desks and carved in the walls of the hallways, marking our presence.
The way our voices raced to climb each other's until we felt like we were heard.

The way we crashed and burned and laughed our days away.

The way we left parts of ourselves everywhere we went, burying them under the earth for someone to find when we are gone.

And the way the mountains echoed back our names when we shouted them in the dark.