Fossils of a human heart

I shed dead skin in a trail of diary entries and old poems, snaking through my life’s path – the fossils of the human heart, footprints, preserved in stone.

I watched the slow extinction of a past girl – each leaf dropping eventually, though new ones will grow. I read the things she wrote and it’s peculiar – how much she isn’t me.

The air smells fresh outside, it’s been raining today – a comforting white noise, but I don’t have you here to put your head on my shoulder, and tell me about now things

that keep me grounded here. So my mind takes a walk, a hopscotch, along my stepping stone leaves or stepping stone petals – my trail of past things that fell from past me.

There are still pieces of her, new flowers grow from old roots. But she was fading, waning, I knew, when I stopped writing about him and started writing about you.

Words and Artwork Lauren Rawlings