It’s an interesting journey,
having your life turned upside-down.
Walking on the ceiling
is about as difficult as it looks,
tiptoeing around the dusty chandeliers
in our fancy house on the hill, somehow emptier now
than it was, though no physical objects
have been removed. Not yet.
Sure, there was the empty nest,
but this is a bigger hole, one whose depth
I sense most keenly
when you sit at the breakfast table
and read the paper in silence.
I peek over your shoulder
from my vantage point near the light fixture –
it’s 1985. There is a photograph.
You’re wearing a white dress, standing beside
a clean shaven beanpole that looks
something like me.
We were so present then,
no emptiness, only the great expectancy
worn so freely (and treated so carelessly)
by the young and hopeful.
It’s time to fold that paper now,
to place it carefully in an album
that will be kept because it should be,
but never opened because it shouldn’t,
until many years have passed
and I have come down from the ceiling
to share a right-side-up breakfast
with the ones I love.
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