The Kaleidoscope of Youth: A Poetic Reflection on Attachment and Time

Describe an item you were incredibly attached to as a youth. What became of it?

Youth

In the cradle of unkempt summers,
where time dripped like honey from the comb,
I cradled a relic, small and silent,
an artifact born of no kingdom,
yet reigning over my boyhood empire.
Its edges were worn whispers of afternoons,
its colors—fading rebellions of imagination.
To me, it was not a thing but a hymn,
singing of secret adventures,
a world that spun only for me.

I

I was a collector of fleeting infinities,
a curator of moments wrapped in plastic and breath.
In the mirror, a thousand faces of who I could be,
but this—this item held them all.
Each night I whispered to it,
a confession, a plea, a thank-you.
In its silence, I found a voice,
in its stillness, an orbit.
I was no one without it,
and yet, because of it, I was.

Time

Time arrived uninvited,
a thief with sandpaper hands.
It wore down the shine,
peeled away the veneer of our shared existence.
And I, ungrateful for the erosion,
allowed it to drift.
First into a drawer,
then into a box,
and finally into the past.
Memory clung to it, but faintly,
like a postcard from a fading city.
Time neither forgives nor forgets;
it simply moves.

That Item

It was a kaleidoscope,
a portal of tumbling glass and fractured rainbows.
Through it, the mundane fractured,
became art, became hope.
It smelled of dust and daydreams,
its tiny barrel a corridor to infinity.
Now? Perhaps it rests in a landfill,
its glass shattered,
a silence too heavy to speak of.
Or maybe it belongs to another child,
its magic reborn, refracted anew.

All Together

Youth, I, Time, that Item—
we once danced in perfect rhythm,
spun by the gravity of belief.
Now, they stand apart,
like constellations too distant to connect.
And yet, I see the light of that kaleidoscope,
not in shards or prisms,
but in the kaleidoscope of me—
the way I fracture,
the way I rebuild,
the way I hold onto a thing
until it becomes not a thing,
but a world.

#YouthMemories #PoeticReflection #Nostalgia #Poetry #CherishedItems #TimeAndChange #PersonalGrowth