In Retrospect

Daily Prompt: From the Collection of the Artist

July 24, 2013

It’s the year 2113. A major museum is running an exhibition on life and culture as it was in 2013. You’re asked to write an introduction for the show’s brochure. What will it say?

Photographers, artists, poets: show us RETROSPCTIVE.

Looking back on things

Isn’t always black or white;

No pun intended,

Although it does fit right.

We revisit time

Through  photographs and memories

And relive a revised version of life

With an increase or decrease

Always. It’s never the same:

Either we had everything

The world had to offer

Or we had zero, nil, nothing.

Sepia, in our heads

Can become vivid HD

And the finest-hued memory

House a black and white zombie;

In retrospect, it wasn’t

The end of the world, we say

But only when we have forgotten

How it felt, live, that day.

In retrospect, it was

The happiest time in my life.

No it wasn’t – you just don’t feel, now,

All that pain and strife,

Which was the most that you’d known

Back in those days

And felt as bad as the new limits

Seem to nowadays.

I say “seem”

Because even this is relative. See,

In retrospect,

This won’t be worst you will see.

But I’m not pessimistic:

No, Sir, not me –

I believe what you’ve lost

Is nothing to what you shall see.

Retrospective, Merriam-Webster says,

Can mean looking back on past situations

Or just as easily: an artist’s best work

(Over time) showed in exhibitions.

What does it mean to me?

I think it means this:

Never trust your  altered view of the past –

Alternatives exist.

A Piece of My Childhood

Daily Post: Bittersweet Memories

You receive a gift that is bittersweet and makes you nostalgic. What is it?

Photographers, show us GIFT.

I felt my hands get heavier as she placed my surprise gift in it. It wasn’t for my birthday, and it wasn’t Christmas either….she just told me she’d found something that had reminded her of me, so she’d picked it up while on the road, at some dusty stop somewhere.

“Can I open them now?” I asked, slightly impatient and irritated, more from fear of disappointing her by my reaction than anything else.

“Sure,” she replied. I could hear her smiling through her words.

I opened my eyes slowly, and looked down at my cupped palms – it was a Nintendo 64 Donkey Kong game cartridge. It was several seconds before I could shake my gaze away; a shiver ran down my spine as I looked her in the eye and tried to make her understand what was going through me, because, for once, I had no words.

My mind flashed back to the days my friends and I used to play Donkey Kong on the Nintendo 64 gaming console. I was eight or nine years old, at most, and Donkey Kong used to feature heavily in our after-school get-togethers. It reminded me of a time of happiness in my life, a time I wished I had gradually grown out of, instead of being plucked from in the sort of rude awakening life tends to dole out at one point or another. The days after that had been difficult to get through – hours and days and weeks and months and years of loneliness and tear-stained pillows, bad grades and self-doubt. It was only much later that I’d managed to get it together again and grow strong enough to go out and get the things I knew were waiting for me – one of them being her.

I jerked an arm around her and pulled her close in a one-armed hug, not letting go of that piece of my childhood, and buried my head in the crook of her neck. She put her arms around me then, and I knew she was smiling that serene smile of hers. She’d understood.

http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/05/21/daily-prompt-bittersweet/