not having had any family but of my own choosing

--i do miss the people i left behind.  the people who abused me, who made me a little crazy, who gifted me these curious scars i call my creativity, i miss them.  i miss those places, the padded smell of cloverfields, sundried kudzu flaking like papyrus, the endless red clay afternoons.  it should be impossible to miss alabama: but people die, and places are erased, whether by lightning or buyout, and all the dread that went alongside winter spring summer and fall's glory, that stuff is as dead as my grandparents.  filed in amber, suspended in the fine comb of slowed time--  because what is memory but increments of spacetime re-encoded in an impermanent neurochemical matrix  --locked precious in a bone vault where light neither penetrates nor is generated.  i miss them though all they were is with me now; i miss them because i lost them and i am losing them again, as time & experience & wear weathers these memories into so many insensible scales of driftglass.  as my memory decays and their faces-- which i kept no photos of --are made strange to me.  if i were to see my father today, or my mother, would i recognize them?  the last times i saw either were in 2004 & 2012, respectively.  two weeks ago i walked out of a public restroom, having locked my bike up outside not two minutes previously, and when i looked around i did not see it and panicked, thinking it stolen, briefly-- but no, i had only locked it up in a place i'd never used before, out of my immediate field of vision.  still, that tiny taste of fear is a preview of what i probably have waiting for me.  one day i will not remember them, and i will be afraid, and i'm not quite sure what to make of that, because i wanted to be rid of them and all the hell that went with growing up there.  so.  yeah