“A Case Against Nostalgia”

by Christ Keivom

After Richie Hofmann I remember being thirteen, reading Sexton, alone in that house where childhood was a test with no tutor for me.

Father gone. Mother dead. The hope of answers in a prayer. The hopeless hours of waiting; for what is expected but never arrives: the phone call, the letter, the end.

This morning I looked for words like lost keys in the dark. To describe the feeling I had when I saw you just recently— how you reminded me of a line by Sexton. There—in the wind, your hair flailing like fishes caught in a net, your white-spotted dress unfurling like the sails of a ship.

All day, I have been scratching the itch of that feeling; enlarged by the desire of knowing what it doesn’t know, as if recalling something from far and so long ago, by the hour, growing still, the feeling cascading in overlapping waves of insistence that went on insisting: How I loved Sexton before I loved writing.

How I loved writing before I loved you.

How I love you twice as much as I love the both.