My past has been locked tight into dirty, leatherette boxes. It has been concealed under the lyart cover of the lumpy, spring mattress in the stuffy back room of my woeful house. Stuffed into rusty teakettles, under creaky floorboards, into the quietest corner of the attic, my past is hidden. In every nook and cranny of the decrepit house to which I bear my residence have I ensconced my past. Still, it manages to escape and bombard me.

It sounds like forgotten promises, innocent enough but still with cause to dwell. Listening to my past, I hear the rustling of crispy, dead leaves, crackling faintly under the cumbersome weight of a long gone hound. Countless voices, in silent protest, blare unrelentingly in my ears. Then, I hear a sound to break the doldrums. Ethereal, forgiving, and breathtaking, it is a pure, high note, one of which I cannot place, but it warms me, and had warmed me before.

Whenever I chance a taste of my past, I am over come with sensation. All things considered, sweet and sour sauce would describe it best. It tastes like unappreciated sweat, a kind of dull, melancholy flavor, but not entirely without the harmony of honey. It tastes like beet dirt, like shoe leather, like meringue. Every once in a while it tastes rather like mud, but never for too long.

It looks like a cheaply published, yellow-paged, book, my past, one that has adorned a seller’s shelf for years without a hope of being sold. It looks like the person in the photograph that can’t ever be placed, like a four-leaf clover, decayed into a state of only three leaves. Gazing upon my past, I see a piece of sheet music full of longueurs. But, for the laborious strife of the composer, an excerpt here or there is as glamorous as can be.

I observe much more of my past. I hear and taste more, too. It is unavoidable, and dear. It beckons to be felt more, but that is asking too much, for, if I contemplate my past for too long, I sense the present.