I will forget you

I am forgetting you already

Look how I burn the archive

Look how I make extinction look like dancing

In the future

They will call it mutation

The way this body holds what it was never meant to survive

Like silence in a mother’s mouth

You say I remember too much

But I think the remembering is what makes me human

And the forgetting is what made me dangerous

Once you touched me like I was language

Fragile, evolving and full of spelling errors

You said my name like it might end the war inside you

But memory is not linear

It loops like code

Like longing, like your hand still hovering on my back

In every mirror I pass

Some nights I wake up

Half machine, half boy, half scream

Trying to burn the part of me that still believes you’ll return

If I leave the light on

What is forgetting if not a form of time travel

I rewind, I try to erase the Mandinka on my tongue

I dream your voice in a language

That hasn’t been invented yet

Still, the archive persists

And the body reboots with your name in its nature

Witness how this body can keep what it no longer want

Like ash still warm, like a planet too tired of spinning

My skin still holds the shape of you leaving

I will forget you, I promise

Look how I burn myself trying to

If you do not wake yourself from that grave, I will

I have already mapped the algorithm

But then I breathe and you are here? inside the exhale

Inside the scar that whispers like a prophecy

Father

Look at me

I am forgetting you

But not all at once

Never, all at once