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Carrying What's Forgotten

by Johnny Packer
Chapter 2
I thought the calling would come back louder.
It didn’t.
It went silent the way a hand goes still
after finishing its work.

Now things arrive without asking.
A bend in a river I’ve never crossed
tells me where the stones are slick.
A porch I’ve never stood on
leans under my weight like it remembers me.
I know which floorboard will sigh
before it does.

None of it feels stolen.
That’s the problem.

I’ll be walking and suddenly I miss someone
I can’t place.
Grief hits clean and precise,
like it belongs to a life that had rules
I followed once.
I taste summer dust.
Hear a woman humming
somewhere behind my eyes.
I don’t know the tune
but my chest knows when it ends.

I try to sort what’s mine.
My name holds.
My hands look right.
But the memories don’t line up by year anymore.
They stack by feeling instead.
Loss first.
Then waiting.
Then the long quiet after.

Sometimes I catch myself avoiding a road
for reasons I can’t defend.
Sometimes I stop in the middle of nowhere
because something inside me says
this is where it happened.
Whatever it was.

The woods haven’t come back.
The trail stays honest.
But I carry a map now
that doesn’t belong to this valley.
It keeps pointing toward places
that never learned my footsteps
and still feel familiar enough to hurt.

If this was a gift,
it was given sideways.
If it was a warning,
it arrived too late.

I don’t think the thing in the trees
wanted to keep me.
I think it needed to remember something
and found I had room.

Now I walk with two pasts
and only one body,
trying not to look too closely
at which memories feel truer
when the night gets quiet.