Box with no Key

All that is left is this box.

I found it where I should not have been.

Looking for something that should not have been found.

You told me not to follow you there.

That it would be lonely and dangerous where you were going.

So here I am sitting waiting for you only with a box that must not be opened.

Maybe you are here under a stone or behind that tree.

But I cannot find you no matter how much I look.

Or maybe it is not that I cannot find you but rather that I cannot see you.

Maybe my eyes are too naive and young to see things as old and weathered as you.

So maybe I can hear you?

Is that you I hear calling out for me, flitting over my head?

Are you calling out to me and am I too focused on looking, to hear?

Or are you too quick for me to catch?

I always was one to meander while you always walked ahead holding my hand and tugging me along.

Was it that this time you forgot about me as I stumbled behind both hands clutching the box instead of your hand?

The box was heavy you see and I could not hold it and you.

So, I choose the box. Pandora’s box to your safe warm hands.

I am lost looking for you

I am lost and scared and confused.

If only you had told me what was in the box then I would not have fallen so far behind.

A box full of pain and memories that are better left unseen, you said.

A hole full of a life better left unlived.

But I don’t understand I cried after you.

How can memories hold only pain when life holds everything?

Or did they turn into something else?

Pain left untreated will always leave scars the type to flare up with rain or cold.

Am I holding your scars as you walk away, as you leave me behind?

You told me it was lonelier where you were going.

But I am here alone with your box of unsaid things.

Of words that talk as though I need to carry my own box of pain.

Carry it on my back and dump in it all the failures all the loss all the things that didn’t go my way.

So much so that my back will bend and my fingers break from the weight of my pain and the pain of all those that came before me.

Carry it until I cannot any more till I too will put it in a corner and burn away the key.

Turning any possibility of healing into ash.

To be hidden away under rocks, or behind that tree.

Or carried away by the wind on the feathers of your wings.