a lost suitcase of memories

a poem I wrote some months ago

i am everywhere but in myself

it’s possible to find pieces of me lying around

so many of them I wonder

what people see when they look at me?

can they truly see me when all that is most essential

it’s not here?

because

i look in the mirror and cannot describe what i see

i simply don’t have words

i feel an emptiness beyond me

that traverse me and go

far

from the inside and from the surface

of who i am

i am a lost suitcase of memories and dreams

i am white walls in different places

i am paintings inside broken frames

i am books left in boxes in someone else’s house

i am postcards from places i never truly went

i am all the airplanes that never landed

or that landed anywhere else

but here

i am the sun that rises somewhere behind the rain

but i am also the rain that falls ceaselessly

so in the end

am i actually anything? or simply nothing at all?

if all i am is lost

or

somewhere else

do i still have the hope of finding the missing pieces?

of completing what is undone?

or will i forever feel

this

ineffable sense of

forgetting myself, because what i should remember

i cannot find?

by Antônia D. G. Lau