Never Fear

I’m at the age where nostalgia’s candle
burns bright.
The yearning for something from the past
can be
unbearable at times,
the bursting chest and brain,
the feeling you can reach out
and almost touch that person’s hand,
step into an event so vivid it’s a photograph
of the highest resolution
you carry in an album close at hand.
You hear a conversation as though it were
preserved on a recording
of the highest quality,
even hear the ambient sounds around you
at that moment so long ago,
it may have traveled to the end of the universe by now.
The older you become,
the greater that desire to recapture
whatever it may have been you long for.
But never fear, I know.
Time has built into you a cure for this heartache, heartbreak.
It is the magic hocus-pocus
of how all photos will eventually fade,
all sound recordings eventually wear to silence.
The longer you live,
the less you will recall,
the candle consuming itself,
memory lane paved away in windblown sand,
and you will burn lower and less
with nostalgic loss
and a desire for what you will come to wonder
was ever left behind.