ashes to ashes

“I hope you get where you’re going, and be happy when you do.”
- Jack Kerouac

it was the winter when love was too heavy to carry,
so you swallowed it,
washed it down with the words you couldn’t figure out how to say.
it was the winter when you learned a new form of forgetting yourself:
cremation, you called it.

those were the months when you always ate alone and read books you didn’t like,
when you lost the list of people to call and couldn’t remember your own name.
you lived in photographs and wore socks made of sorrow and dreamt in hues of orange,
slept in the kitchen and cried on christmas.

but in the spring you learned the word resurrection
when your feet sank into the soft carpet of earth that april rolls out every year.
it felt nice to get un-stuck again with every step,
to let your feet carry you to a place that wasn’t heaven, just
somewhere in between
somewhere next to normal
somewhere close to happy.