I used to live there
and I admit
I do still visit
when I forget,
sinking back
into the piles of laundry,
the dust under beds and on the blades
of outdated ceiling fans in every room,
so many things left undone and haunting
when I could not find
the key to start the engine
for motion
most days.
Moving the house and home
of me
from the sink hole
started slowly
at first,
a notion
of another possible address
where a clean slate
could be gifted
from me
to me
a space
unknown
but felt enough
to at first help my head rise from the pillow
more toward
the day
and less, less the night.
Moving is never a matter of money,
but instead an issue of inner knowing
of just where one lives
in truth.
I see the one who lives there, now,
in the front
still in his pajamas
watering the weeds
that won the battle over the grass,
and my chest muscle tightens –
remembering the pain of my own lost address,
but what can I say?
Only to whisper,
gentle, from the distance
of my passing car:
remember
you don’t have to live there
one second more –
you too
can be one
who knows
that you used to live
where you are now
but you will have learned
that you don’t have to
live there
anymore.
Life as Improv 
I too used to live there, and still visit now and then when I forget. Thank you Marga for this lovely reminder.
Thank you. We are neighbors! 🙂
Lovely poem 👌😊
Thank you Kellie!
I think I am still moving boxes out. Looking for Tupperware lids. Wondering why we have eight knives and eight forks but only six spoons. Each box comes up to the bottom of my nose and I get lost as I schlep them across town. I stop and set them down, paw through them. Try to remember where I was going again… It’s weird to move from a fixed address to everywhere at once, because somehow there’s no place to store your things!
You are so perfectly playful and you point out the unsaid thing – where is home, really?! Moving to everywhere at once – sometimes I get just a tiny bit of a glimpse of immensity and I panic and pull back in and try to hold this collection of cells together at imaginary edges. Hello, you, t(here).
Moment by moment remembering – I don’t have to live there anymore. Sometimes it seems I’m too stubborn to let go. And then I remember and laugh.
Lovely reminder.
Alison xo
Perfectly said, A! The veil of forgetting though can have such a pull, at times. Even in the forgetting, there seems to be some shift in not residing, not keeping a toothbrush, in that home anymore. 🙂 xx m
I think it’s not possible to live in the same place, even if I never move. The place changes around me. My only choice is whether to acknowledge it and how to respond.
Sort of like how we can never step in the same stream twice. There has never been any there there. The more riddle(y) it gets, the closer it seems. Hello fellow homeless friend! 🙂
Beautiful.
Hello There! 🙂