“I don’t know of any writer who doesn’t look back at their earlier books and think: can we just shred them? You know, can we go door to door and collect them and shred them?”
—David Sedaris, to Bill Maher, on Real Time, HBO, 2023 March 24th
past
Long ago now
I am searching for my feelings
through shelves of dusty books
can’t help but feel I’ve left them
in some forgotten ancient nooks
as if an author long before me
captured my emotions in his day
and saved them in fine poetry
for future me to find someway
—Terri Guillemets
Real eyes
Now that I’m over the hill
I can see it’s just made of
skeletons of dead monsters
that were never really there.
But that past is no less high
and no less there, and I am
no less on the other side of it.
—Terri Guillemets
Ten thousand fathoms deep
“You peer into my life to find a lingering past, but I tell you it was sunk ten thousand fathoms deep and weighted down with my dead self. You look into my breast to find that old, old open wound, but I tell you I seared it with my hot tears and only the cicatrix is there.”
—Muriel Strode (1875–1964), My Little Book of Prayer, 1904
Branching
this winter afternoon
i stare between bare
branches of gray trees
in the distance i see
an unreturnable past
or a dwindling future
i can’t tell which but
the silence is sublime
—Terri Guillemets
Missed
Over time, the hurt doesn’t hurt. Only regret does.
—Terri Guillemets
Wilted
The past falls away in wilted petals,
New things will come, probably nettles.
—Terri Guillemets
It’s now
Don’t let the past steal your present.
—Terri Guillemets
History & destiny
The past can’t see you, but the future is listening.
—Terri Guillemets
Stitches & seams
I need to get over the hard times of my past. They’ve left scars, but scars are just memories.
—Terri Guillemets
Passed down
To journal is a present of the past to your future self.
—Terri Guillemets
Stories of love
In a new love, it’s easy to live for the moment because there is no past. The more past you accumulate, the harder it is not to live there — and that’s true whether it’s good or bad.
—Terri Guillemets
Chasing the past
Chasing the past, I stumbled into the future.
—Terri Guillemets
P.S. Thanks so much to Rebecca for letting me know that this quote was used in the television show Being Erica. In the episode “Plenty of Fish,”
Paper doesn’t forget
We write to remember our nows later.
—Terri Guillemets