Tell Me

There are things that memory keeps and seals in a locket, often gleaming with an untarnished intensity when opened and childhood emerges, wide eyed and ready to catch the light. Old minds push much of childhood aside and dismiss as fantasy the fire and freeze that rage across the wildlands of little lives. Real life comes later, they say. Feelings burnt into the tissue of a young child's brain are just passing shadows playing tricks to feign a lasting permanence. They'll soon get over it. Yet, as you read, who can't recall the flame that burned in the heart when it found its first love in a class at primary school. Tell me, that what swept the mind back then was nothing but a glancing crush or bruise too shallow to last a week, that the tears and love that welled when the other was near, never was real but a childish deception. Tell me the depths of so much feeling was an invention, a silly game, a virus caught from a book and that childhood can never bless the soul with authentic love or scar it with pain. Tell me how it is that a face can still be seen and memory has not let go of a name.