Memory

I saw your face
in my dream last night,
a half forgotten memory
with enough back story
to ignite fresh emotion.

I had left the past
in the sea of forgetfulness,
yet somehow fragments
bumped against the shoreline,
unwanted flotsam and jetsam
of my former life.

The currents are fickle
in their timing
to resurface unwanted thoughts.
They have floated unseen
for so long.

I had thought them
absorbed by the ocean.

Yet they still retain their form
clearly enough for me to recognize them,
and immediately wish I hadn't.

A fresh path of memory track
laid unwittingly,
another choice to lay aside.

It is not so much
a haunting of the past,
as a flash of a familiar face in the crowd
that causes you to double take.

It is not them
and never will be.
They have long gone,
but their memory remains.