Scraps

(very random piece that’s probably best as spoken word — from a prompt given at a recent Writers’ Collective of Canada workshop)

I put you in a scrapbook.

You’d hate that. Too sentimental and whimsical for you.

Ever the pragmatist; nihilist even, at times.

Why do I hang on to all these little bits of the past?

At least I never got that tattoo.

That would be to make permanent

A scar of something best left transient.

The scrapbook forms a map of lived experience, in imagined worlds.

Yet I’m still carrying it all around with me, the detritus of our lives

tangled up in the recesses of my purse with the bandaids and bank slips and gum wrappers.

You only ever gave me scraps

But I kept the receipts

and make collages of the way it might have been

and call that closure.