What We Bury Learns to Swim

I have buried things that still breathe beneath me. Names. Nights. Versions of myself I covered with years and called healed. But memory has gills. I know because I have smiled with entire funerals in my mouth. I have called it growth when really, I had only become fluent in avoiding certain rooms inside myself. A childhood can hide inside a grown man. A dead voice can live inside a sentence. A wound can lose its date and still remember your name. Perhaps that is why rain feels familiar. It is proof that disappearance is sometimes only a change of form. And lately, I have begun meeting myself in things I thought I survived. An old fear. A familiar silence. A pain wearing a new face. That is the cruelty of burial. You think you are putting something beneath you. Until one night you hear knocking from below and realise you were not burying the past. You were burying yourself. And something down there has finally learned how to dig.