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Take One
In the stillest moments,
film reels swirl around my head
A carousel of memories
whirling round and round
out of control
I can’t keep up.
How long is this movie?
I whisper
no one answers
How could they,
when no one heard?
Pictures flashing, swirling
fleeting moments, I can only glance;
pieces of a puzzle, I will never see complete.
A silent film
each frame flickers, fading out
like a memory held on for too long
It becomes harder to watch,
harder to see.
Grains of sand
slipping through my fingers,
hopelessly out of reach
I’ve looked at these pictures so long
portraits they become
so muddled with memory
the colors have run.
What to do, but to paint a pretty
“picture this”, I say
this time loudly
for all to hear
I’ve fixed it
it’s better
It means nothing.
they didn’t know what it looked like before when it was bad, review
that’s what I gave it.
Everyone claps
but I know it hasn’t come far enough
I’ll let it burn out again,
until it’s something completely
new, are you?
You haven’t seen this film before
What’s it about, you ask
I’m not sure
but I can tell you about the next one.
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This piece immerses the reader in memory's dizzying, impermanent nature through an extended metaphor of reminiscences as frenzied, flickering film reels. The speaker becomes trapped, inundated by a cyclonic whirlwind of fragmentary imagery that conveys how obsessively revisiting the past overwhelm and distort their memory. The more desperately they cling to and scrutinize these moments in time, the more abstract and unrecognizable they become, ultimately driving the speaker to reimagine and rewrite their past experiences. This fabricated facade obscures the very authentic, if flawed, reminiscences it seeks to erase or embellish, leaving us with the bitter truth that some memories are best left untouched by our destructive need to possess, dissect, and endlessly rework them into something they're not.