may 1937. (sharon olds).

i see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges.
i see my father strolling out under the ocher sandstone arch,
the red tiles glinting like bent plates of blood behind his head.
i see my mother with a few light books at her hip,
standing at the pillar make of tiny bricks with the
wrought-iron gate still open behind her,
its sword-tips back in the may air.
they are about to graduate.
they are about to get married.
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is;
they are innocent.

they would never hurt anybody.

i want to go up to them and say;
stop, don't do it - she's the wrong woman,
he's the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do.
you are going to do bad things to children.
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of.
you are going to want to die.
i want to go up to them there in the late may sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,

but i don't do it.

i want to live.

i take them up like male and female paper dolls,
and bang then together at the hips like chips of flint,
as if to strike sparks from them, i say;

do what you are going to do.

and i will tell about it.

if i were a painter.

i think what hurts the most about remembering the things you thought were long gone, is the fact that they eluded your conscious mind for so long you allowed yourself to believe they no longer existed there.
forgetting pain is in itself one of life's greatest tragedies. some pains send us to emergency rooms, to asylums, some pains send us to church, to overgrown graveyards, some pains even send us to the doorsteps of those that lost us somewhere in the madness, to confront something that we never acknowledged but at the same time, never allowed it to leave our immediate thoughts. pain knows that human beings are by their very nature, selfish as hell. pain is fates way of saying, "okay asshole, you screwed up. fix it." and we do. not because we did wrong, not because we feel bad about it, but because it hurts- and we want it to stop. so much in fact, that we will assume the role of a loving, caring, honest and pure soul just to give our self-absorbed genetic material some momentary relief.

fate then, uses our asinine complex-holding human self-absorption against us, to make us better people. to make us stronger teachers to those who can't understand on their own. to make us more apt to understand why we need to use what we learn, to intervene the next time we see someone letting go too quickly, and most importantly-

to know when we should let them.