Memories. Uninvited 🔁

They creep into your unexpected moments

Some you welcome with warmth and a grateful smile

Others...you wish would stay buried...

...way down deep somewhere, where the unwelcome sleep

You know they're just memories -----

they return in the quiet of your sacred moments,

you try to gasp it into reality...or unreality

but the words never make it to your lips.

They are those old songs you once lilted innocently,

when you were too young to know their meaning.

It is the cat you fed once,- when naivety was a happy place

and you never stopped feeding it, until it went on its way.

It is the ghost who knows you remember,

even when you say you don’t.

🔁 Memory arrives like the stray cat of yesteryear

Or like a song you didn’t ask to recall...

Just a ghost that wants to be acknowledged.

It comes back the way of the uninvited...

silent, certain, already inside

before you notice the door was still ajar.

It pads across the floor of your mind,

nose twitching at old corners,

curling itself into the warmest ache

as if it never left.

Sometimes it returns as the windswept voice

of an old lover

whom you have long disremembered

a few sad notes rising from nowhere,

carrying the scent of a year you thought you’d outgrown.

Other times it is a ghost with no interest in haunting,

only in being acknowledged.

It stands in the doorway, hands empty,

waiting for you to stop pretending

you don’t see it.

You tell yourself you’re busy.

You tell yourself you’ve moved on.

But the memory knows the path back

better than you know the path away.

So you sit with it~~~

this uninvited visitor,

this soft, persistent echo ---

and for a moment

you let it be what it is:

just something that remembers you

too well to stay gone.