Cyclone

You must have forgotten me.

I don't blame you, of course.  I know the days get busily blurry like half-remembered dreams and the nights grow dark, causing even the strongest souls to shiver.  Trust me, I know that in the deep recesses of your unawakened subconsciousness, you may have an image of who you think I am.  It is the itch you can't scratch, the name you can't fit to a face even though our lives have crisscrossed like the x's in Tic Tac Toe.  You might deny it, claim to know exactly who I am, though secretly searching through the file of people in your mind trying to fit my face.  If you remembered me, though, you wouldn't be here.  You'd remember the name Simran Stone and that the name belongs to me.

Oh me.  Oh my.  My old friend.  I think you may have deliberately ripped me from your being.  You know I bring along with me something some find too painful to remember and some, too sweet to forget.  Which, pray tell, do you fit in with?  Actually, let me answer that for you.  You chose to forget.  Is it because I am quick to make the wrong decisions and slow to make the right?  Or is because my face reminds you of a place, barren and smoggy, that is far from here and filled with the pain of a thousand goodbyes?  I thought that you liked me because I was complicated, but meeting you again reminds me that no one likes complications.

Despite all this, it is good to see you again.  It feels like sixteen lives have been lived in a total of three years, showing that time makes us utterly different people.  You've changed a great deal, old pal, but then again so have I.  I am no longer the girl that chases dreams like they were butterflies entangled in a webbed net.  I am no longer the small child that cried only to have a taste of salty water since the ocean was thousands of miles away.  I am new, but I haven't forgotten who I was.

When you met me, I remembered quite a few things.  I remembered that you were looking for something, or someone.  You may have been searching for a lightness in the deepest of the blackness, because everyone is searching for something yellow, aren't they?  I remember how you told me, as they pulled you away, that you would remember me.  You would remember me always.  Only later, just a few weeks after you returned home to your warm bed that enveloped you and made you dream, did you find out the meaning of my name.

This is the part where you wait for the answer.  You think I will give it to you; the finger on the trigger, the number on the ticket.  Simran.  It means....

No such luck.  You are a functioning human being, or at least you were when we last met.  You have bones in your fingers that bend and groan.  You have joints that ache and muscles that spasm.  You have a heart in your chest that beats like a drum, causing your ribcage to do a dance every other second.  You're fully capable.

It's a choice, my old friend.  To see my face.  To remember, even if part of you doesn't want to, exactly who I am.  What I was to you.  There is such a triumphant roar in your mind when you'll place me in a memory that fits, just like a key in a lock.  Click.  There it is.  You've got it.  

But where does that leave me now?  I gave up on the dreams of a child.  I am older now but instead of being ready for the world to come and kick me down like I was when I was oh-so young, I am ready to fall face first into the center of the universe.  To fall into the blackness that humans like you and I always seem to fight.  I guess it doesn't hurt me so much anymore.  To remember, that is.  The past is a shade of sorrow and the future is a tone that hasn't begun.

But here I am.  Simran.  You can call me Simi, of course, because it makes no difference to a soul that has begun the deep and dark plunge into the world of unknown consequences and the clutching of lungs that rip away your breath.  When you chose to forget, I chose to remember.  And here again, we meet, and a new trail of memories follows closely behind us.  Are you ready to remember me as I am now?  You've forgotten who I was then.  I am unsure you will like the new me; the me that enjoys the fall but loathes the crash.

Are you ready to fall with me, trailing memories down the cyclone of remembered rememberings?

Good, because here we go.    

That bad to fail, that hard to fall.