Dr. Padmashree R P Poet Free verse

Inventory of the Forgotten

I keep a ledger of small disappearances:
the umbrella I left on the train,
the phone number I forgot to save,
the name of that restaurant
where we had the perfect meal.

These aren't tragedies
nobody died,
but they're not nothing either.
They're the slow leak of a life,
the way a boat takes on water
so gradually you don't notice
until you're ankle-deep and sinking.

My grandmother's recipe
died with her because 
I never thought to ask.
I can still taste them onions, garlic, ghee.
But, taste is not the same as knowing.
Taste is just another form of missing.

The books I lent and never got back:
each one a small betrayal,
not by the borrower but by me,
for believing things could return
unchanged, 
for thinking I could trust
that what I give away 
will somehow boomerang.

There's a word in every language I've studied
that I've forgotten, 
and somewhere
there's a person who remembers me
in a way I no longer remember myself,
a version of me that's preserved
like a fly in amber, unchanging,
while I've moved on and morphed
into someone who wouldn't recognise
that earlier iteration if we passed
each other on the street.

The songs I used to know by heart
now come back in fragments:
first verse, 
chorus, 
then nothing
like a jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing,
the picture there but incomplete,
edges leading nowhere.

I think about archaeologists
centuries from now, 
sifting through
the digital ruins of our age,
trying to reconstruct us from fragments:
an incomplete email thread,
a corrupted backup file,
a social media account abandoned mid-thought.

Will they understand that we were always
losing ourselves this way,
leaving pieces scattered like breadcrumbs
that birds have already eaten?

Some nights I lie awake and try
to catalog what's gone:
addresses, 
passwords, 
the plot of movies I once loved,
the faces of people who mattered
then somehow stopped mattering.

It's not Alzheimer's, 
just life
the natural entropy of memory,
the slow dissolve of detail
until all that's left is feeling:
I was there. 
It was important.
I can't remember why.

Maybe this is how we become ghosts
even while we're living:
layer by layer, we fade,
until we're just outlines,
just the impression of a person
where a person used to be.

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