Blink

How can you ever have been real,

If you’re not anymore?

I’m looking at your face now. 

How could it ever have existed 

If it doesn’t anymore?

Are your memories just something 

My mind made up,

Or were you ever someone I could talk to 

But can’t anymore?

How strange to think you were once 

Flesh and blood,

How - how can that dissipate?

How can a soul - how can someone you could 

Touch and hug and hold and smile with 

And smell and feel and hear and know - die?

How can the jokes 

And the advice 

And the eye-rolling 

(for bad advice) 

vanish?

Leaving nothing but sepia feelings…

How can you have lived and breathed 

If all I know of you comes from treacherous memory

And what when I’m gone too, 

Taking my memories with me?

Here lies a man who once was… real?