Memoir of a Forgotten Memory

There's a friend lost somewhere. There always is. Someone or something that brought out childhood laughter, someone or something that was there to hold when the sky fell. A neighborhood crush, maybe a teddy bear. A random snippet of a show on television. A sad movie whose title was never known. Or, perhaps, the perfect angle out of the corner of an eye that revealed a rainbow no one else could see. Mist in the wind from a dying raincloud running through sprinklers.

The days when a mirror was just another toy are long gone. Reflections no longer reflective, the face staring back just another enemy, allied with the onslaught of time. What happened yesterday seems as distant as what happened yesteryear. If it wasn't photographed, it never was, and the truth of being there becomes nothing more than subjective doubt to be argued by others. Does the book exist, or was it authored in a dream?

There's a friend alive somewhere, and where is the question. Is it just vanity to wonder if there is wonder, as well? The same streets were walked, after all, even if names escape the tip of the tongue. Staring at a map doesn't help; the world was too small back then. It's smaller now, of course, but only because there's less that matters. Loud words pretend otherwise, reveling in the unaware hypocrisy of quiet actions.

Magic was real, Once Upon a Time. Words and images penetrating fertile imagination now lay fallow in the December of life. Praying for it now won't make a difference. White lights simply white lights, one forgotten among the cries of breathing air for the first time, one imagined amid the loneliness of breathing air for the last. A flash behind the eyes providing one last chance to be found.

There's a friend somewhere.

Do you remember?