Sometimes, you can hear the past breathing.

Sometimes, it may cower behind you; playful like a restless shadow...at different moments, it may plant a kiss upon your face, like a remembrance tenderly and dearly missed.

Perhaps all it took was a tune, a re-run of a funny cartoon, a scent, a story or a backward toss of a remembered loss, now drawered up into a tidy attic memory.

Then playacting a dodgy old sailor, it wills you to clamber in, right into its weather-worn skin, where you could hide in a bunk or a treasure-trunk or a tidy beddy-bye room. You could playact a child again, forgetting your doom, clutching up to your Gems as if they were your precious sweeties or else running up and down a rusty road, searching for a fleeting bliss, in vain.

Sometimes...

And so when the past sashays up your way today, how will you pray that it may stay... or leave for ever...