Broken Frames

Didn't feel like writing anything yesterday. Don't feel like writing anything today, either. But I'd give it a go anyways! I was searching for something in my old file, and that's where I came across all the things I have stuffed in my drawer. Old receipts, letters, empty envelopes with the addresses on them, pens that don't work, safety pins, my old poems, some unfinished stories...

I wonder what makes me want to keep these things. It is this idea of the future, that maybe...some time later I will need these things, or maybe that they are important. Or sometimes, it's just a hasty action to clear up my desk when I believe some one is coming over to visit us and my room looks like a dump.

These items which have no use... (or do they?) remind me of many days of life. Days that are not lived, but just stuffed into these hypothetical drawers for some other time. Days that are spent doing absolutely nothing, as if sometime later I could revisit and do things I always wanted to do. It is indeed a slightly sad feeling that I get from looking at these forgotten items in my desk drawer. I think, for people who (at the end of their lives) turn back and open those hypothetical drawers of life, and see many such use-less and hastily spent days, also have that deep pang of regret. Can these two feelings be compared?

I wrote a poem in April, 2007, which seems be-fitting to this idea:

Broken Frames

Like an old torn page

stuffed into the back of a drawer,

or an Unused box saved

and thrown atop a shelf,

I have stacked some memories

and let myself forget them.

One day when I open that drawer,

my hand shall find that page;

that box may fall in my sight,

my touch will lift the dust of age

and I shall see the cracks and yellow

line those many names...

like lost and faded faces,

that smile through broken Frames.