a week later

a poem about memories

I was walking my dog this morning.
Last week was Easter.
Someone had scrawled
“don’t forget to find the golden egg on 4/5”
on the cracked pavement near my house,
the chalk already fading
like a half‑remembered dare.

It yanked me back
to Easter Sundays as a kid.
My parents would set up baskets,
hide Easter eggs in the damp grass.
There was always one golden egg
with a ten or twenty
folded tight inside—
proof that if you looked hard enough,
there was more than scraps
waiting for you.

At some point—
it’s hard to say when—
they stopped hiding the eggs.
No more glittering plastic promise,
no more bills tucked into hollow shells.
But somewhere inside
I never stopped hunting
for that golden egg.

I went looking for it
in relationships that bled me out,
in a bag of dope,
in bodies I never learned to love,
in toxic friendships
that clung like smoke,
in the next big career move
that ate my soul for a paycheck.
I chased it to the bottom
of a bottle of Irish whiskey,
swallowing glass and calling it gold,
convinced the next swallow,
the next hit,
the next warm body
would finally crack it open.

These days the treasure
isn’t hiding in plastic grass
or at the bottom of a bottle.
It’s the soft jingle of a leash,
my dog’s ears bouncing
as we pass that ghost of a message,
the quiet, uneasy miracle
of a morning with clear eyes,
pockets empty,
hands still shaking a little,
a heart that knows
there was never a golden egg—
just a broken kid
who keeps learning,
step by step,
that being here at all
is its own dark kind of gold