'F' to forget...

Ah, the sand and the beach and the seagull’s cry.

Yes, memories are the treasure that we must protect, and I've lost so many that they become more precious with each day that passes. So many memories lost, pushed to the back rooms of my mind to gather dust, filed under ‘F’ for forget.

‘F’ to forget - if only I could.

So, Whitby… Haven Holidays in the day when they were small and so were the people around me, making me big and important and dressed in white and faded blue. Intense and trying, hard to please, and oh so quick to call. A typical stupid twenty-something-boy-man with too much care and too little of everything that makes life work apart from vain hope and imagined invincibility.

Not much changes apart from a redefinition of hope and the knowing fragility that aging brings.

No photographs even kept. Swept away with the dust, to hide under the dark of the carpet I've wall-to-wall fitted in the back rooms of my mind.

Filed under ‘F’ for forgotten or failed, all the no good times, those nothing to smile about or remember days - and then just recently a reminder came in words so true and simply right it caused a clarity I’d forgotten I’d possessed.

‘I remember yearly hols to Whitby - beautiful place and good times :) and finding pebbles with holes in to make a necklace and playing cricket on the beach which we had to trek down what seemed like a mountain to get to - and Dracula!’

Ah, yes… and Dracula! I remembered too.

Golden fossils which I still keep and hard driven winds and the pub at the bottom of a hundred steps and caravan cooking and dancing to a lone guitarist and wandering, wandering, wandering…

Look out! The rocks are falling!

And just in time I step back and escape the crushing. Bloody jet planes overhead setting up a tremble. I barely avoided the huge falling rocks, but they came later anyway along with the knowing that, as everything and always, holidays never last.

Oh for a stony necklace loosely strung, and for cricket where I made them run, and that hard down walk to a rocky beach that such small girls could barely reach, and laughter, smiles, and Dracula, and Jet, and rope, it seems so far.

And for a moment it all floods back, fish and chips, and silly laughter on wet days playing ludo and a caravan so full that it was too close to being closer.

Memories.

Look out! The rocks are falling!

Get back to the nether rooms of my mind to gather dust, filed under ‘F’ as the stone stringed necklace clatters to the floor. All out for a duck.

But of course they never quite will. :)