Remains

I lift the lid from a box filled with memories,
home to a clutter of paper mementos and ghostly remnants of a lost love -
A faded train ticket, a pressed flower, a dog-eared photograph.
These are the remains of you.
Your fingerprints must linger along with the fading smell of sadness.

When you left, a door slammed shut and extinguished a dying fire forever.
You abandoned me on the quietest road where no-one could hear my cries.
I walked for miles.
You set me adrift in the loneliest ocean
and for a while I thought I might drown in a sea of desolate souls.
I existed in a half-lit world where everything felt like engravings through tissue paper.
Only shades of pain.

I close the lid just as I closed my heart
and the echoes of the past are locked away for another time.

Suddenly I am caught up in a whirlwind of carefree laughter, unruly hair and jam stains.
In him I see the best of me but he also has your eyebrows and lopsided smile.
Such undiluted light shines from within, and I force myself to bask in his warmth for this borrowed time.
He is my antidote to pain, anaesthetic in human form.
A solitary flower poking up through the foliage of regret
he is absolute proof that beauty can be found in even the darkest of places.
It was our son who reminded me to breathe
and who helped to glue back together the remains of me.

Lunging at me with untamed love he challenges me to smell his feet -
which, of course I do willingly -
relishing a brief snapshot in time where only this moment matters.
We are separate and yet connected by an invisible, unbreakable thread.
I kiss his sticky forehead and my lips seek out the untrained down that decorates his brow -
Soft and strong
The remains of you.