Orphans

We’ve left behind orphans, you and I, a gaggle of memories like street urchins left to starve and die in the city of self-imposed amnesia. We’ve staged our own deaths, reciting happy obituaries of our former selves, birth announcements of our new incarnations, everyone duly notified of fissure and closure. So that those troublesome orphans, believing us dead, homeless, unattended, are left forever behind; memories unremembered, past disowned by present. But they know where we are, and they come, knock on the doors behind which we’re safely ensconced in new lives. We let them knock, cringing and waiting with furtive glances from behind closed curtains until they finally recede into the night. They are unconcerned, these little orphans. The camouflage of our reinvented selves don’t hide us. They will be back.