I meant to return long before this
but in looking back we learn too much
of loss and I dreaded that.

Now going through the house
and my parents’ lives
too revealed by what they saved

and what they left behind
for me to find, I feel nothing
but pain for the past

trying to understand
how I fell so short of what I intended
to do with my life.

How life twists and turns
against us. How a childhood
is not really understood

until it is lived a second time
in memory. How wonderful
and how terrible

it seems now
because it is gone
and because it was mine.