Forgotten

I

I've been gutted.
Heart, soul, guts ripped out, forgotten
in the gutter.

Worse yet, I've
forgotten what they feel like.
Heart, soul, guts.

II

An absence of pain
As though the wound had been healed
Forgotten no more.

III

A vortex is what it ends up feeling like, although in the beginning it is barely a crack, a leak, a trickle. It seems to take a very long time to begin, but once you’ve noticed it, the trickle has become rapids cascading down the mountainside of your life.
It has nothing to do with names or keys. Surprisingly enough, computers offer the oddly comforting simile of the folder you open only to find it empty. Not a single file in it. Worse yet, you can’t for the life of you remember why the folder is named “Do-dads”.
The blank you draw leads you down the uncomfortable path of half-remembered sensations that you think you might recall if only you could remember where you felt them, or when.
You want to ask your dead husband, “What was it you whispered in my ear just as the city bus roared past?”, which he ran to catch and so you never got the chance to say “What?” That whispering, that restaurant, that day at that beach, they’re all at that place where memories are vacuumed up as if into a black hole to be left festering beside all the other memories that you don’t even know you’ve forgotten.