Someone Else’s Diary
Mark Millicent
That day you had forgotten
Those words you don’t remember
That scarf you don’t recall wearing
Someone does.
The days that you are done with,
discarded, are alive in someone’s diary.
Someone else’s journal
has preserved those moments
Between lovingly crafted lines
They captured you at the time
Years ago and wrote about you
What you did how you were
What you said how
you made them feel
You don’t remember any of it
They are long ago moments
But they still are still there
Interactions
You thought they had been forgotten
Maybe a few of your days exist
in a few diaries, if you were popular?
Some of your days in pen.
Moments on paper to be relived
by someone now older too
Who also thought they had forgotten you,
flicks through the pages
Your old days visited by people
you no longer know
What you ordered, what you drank in
a place that is no longer, you drove there
in a car that was scrapped decades ago.
Tiny details someone wrote
The waitress that served you
Where you laid your coat
or the barman at the pub
Long since demolished
You don’t remember what was said
Were you good that day in bed?
You live on in other people’s diaries
Frozen in time for good or bad
Days long gone
Memories that linger
accessible at the flick of a finger
The turn of a now yellowed page
In someone else’s diary.
Mark Millicent
That day you had forgotten
Those words you don’t remember
That scarf you don’t recall wearing
Someone does.
The days that you are done with,
discarded, are alive in someone’s diary.
Someone else’s journal
has preserved those moments
Between lovingly crafted lines
They captured you at the time
Years ago and wrote about you
What you did how you were
What you said how
you made them feel
You don’t remember any of it
They are long ago moments
But they still are still there
Interactions
You thought they had been forgotten
Maybe a few of your days exist
in a few diaries, if you were popular?
Some of your days in pen.
Moments on paper to be relived
by someone now older too
Who also thought they had forgotten you,
flicks through the pages
Your old days visited by people
you no longer know
What you ordered, what you drank in
a place that is no longer, you drove there
in a car that was scrapped decades ago.
Tiny details someone wrote
The waitress that served you
Where you laid your coat
or the barman at the pub
Long since demolished
You don’t remember what was said
Were you good that day in bed?
You live on in other people’s diaries
Frozen in time for good or bad
Days long gone
Memories that linger
accessible at the flick of a finger
The turn of a now yellowed page
In someone else’s diary.
Photo by Brigitte Schneiter