Do you remember?

~ Purpleanais

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Do you remember?
I used to wear candy pink for a dare, play the part of the prom queen for a day.
You never took ice in your drink, you liked to drop obscure hints.
We thought we’d be forever linked.

We lit innocent hearts plucked from unlucky bystanders, kindling in our palms we’d quickly discard and throw on the bonfire.

With the tip of our fingers we’d pick up the smouldering embers, watch them slowly die, and
laugh with the cruelty of youth… that has no regard for consequence & can’t comprehend the pain of absence.

There was so much love still to drink and no one had yet clipped our wings.

Do you remember?
We looked for art everywhere, prized intellect and quoted Voltaire, performed pirouettes, pretended to be the precious heir in a play by Molière.
Who did we think we were, all attitude and complicated words.
We thought we were deliciously sarcastic, delightfully ironic, we were – really – pathetic kids verging on the moronic, with impossible standards and a bad case of folie des grandeurs.

Do you remember?

As the violins cried behind the hills, we tried to imbue the bartender with the charm of Michelangelo’s David, but even the power of wishful thinking has its limits and we were left with nothing, not even a pale copy, not even an apprentice’s underdrawing, because the bartender, far cleverer than we were, had scampered with our tenners.

We made our memories and tore them into strips, scattered them to the wind, unable to believe that one day we’d want them back, if not intact then at least some kind of scrap.

Do you remember…
My purple eyeliner left streaks over my face. We still had to learn nobody ever wins this particular race, and that the best you can hope for is to reach the end with some kind of grace.

First posted July 26th 2016

26 thoughts on “Do you remember?”

  2. We still had to learn nobody ever wins this particular race, and that the best you can hope for is to reach the end with some kind of grace.

    The beauty in that statement resembles the woman I know and love. ❤

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  14. For me, the reminiss will always be the most evocative. I have been told ‘never write about looking back’ and that to me seems absolutely impossible and wrong. I am all for looking back bittersweetly and this is why this works so well – it does so in a way we can all relate to that person we were then, how we were together, and how changed we are now and yet, are still able to relate to

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    1. Yep, we discussed this in the past and we were in perfect agreement about it – there’s nothing wrong about looking back and surely it is most evocative because it’s been dissected and analysed a hundred times over…I’m SO tired today, I hope I’m making sense

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  16. Wow! Amazing writing here. You summed of the life of youth perfectly, so very bittersweet times and memories. Very true we eventually want the strips we carelessly threw into the wind when we were young

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