Memories are the keepsakes my heart can sometimes collect. Bronzed in the immortality of the mind, they are my gilded treasures, coveted, protected and cherished. Like an old miser, I am loathe to share. Yet there is, for reasons unknown to me, a drive, a desire to share what few things I hold dear. I suppose in some way I secure those memories in collective form of life, by securing them in the memories of others.

It’s the warm summer nights, the thick air heavy with the scent of fresh cut grass and pine seasoned with salt of the sea. I inhale deeply, as if to grab the fragrance and hold it to me, like a child would clutch a favorite toy. The bouquet of a balmy midsummer night takes me down quiet paths tucked between neighborhoods long left behind.

It reminds me of a hushed time, where I am adrift in an ocean of emotion, lost in tumbling waves of her dark hair. Where words are whispered, carried on a breath so faintly as to be taken by the slightest wind. Words spoken so softly as if they almost never existed, fragile in their tender forms. The intoxication and heat of passions stoked by a sultry summer night, leaves my head swimming. These reflections a bittersweet taste on my palette, and I regret the loss while being grateful of the chance to have it.

My heart is weighed with a stone, and so I bury these emotions, thoughts and memory. I lock them away, deep in recesses of my mind behind thick vault doors. Doors similar to the ones that now hold me, bound by chains of my own manufacture. I look at the life that was, and is now ash in my hands, remembering the time that it was not so. A time of promise, that only youth knows and yet fails to realize. Heavy with regret, and hardened by it, I trundle on to a distant horizon in time unknown.