It Was Just a Game • • • Emma Southern

I don’t know why I like old things

Annika Rennaker

Maybe it’s because holding them feels like holding something heavier. Like gravity, grounding me in a past reality. Maybe it’s because years ago they were held by another. Tactile connections form the impressions of another’s hands. Palms young, palms old. Fingers gentle, calloused, cold? Where did their fingerprints stain and whose skin felt their touch? What about their heart, who patched it when it fell apart? What about their soul, what made it sing, who made it whole? What about their words, whom did they hurt and heal? And if when they wanted, they could not speak, what did they feel? I peel past layers of sand and what I pretend isn’t bone. Brush dust, chisel through stone to pull pictures of a ghost together and breathe life into the “what was.” How beautifully frightening, to awaken the dead with no essence of a sixth sense. How beautifully frightening, that in life there is an end. How beautifully frightening, to believe that there isn’t one. I have no knowledge of the next world, or if such a place exists. But I know that when the dead die, their spirits dance up from the dirt and sing ballads about the ones that leave us, they say they’re never really gone. How beautifully frightening, to watch time go on.