Nicholas Muppidi-Fowler
In loving memory of myself
When I am past this world
and not even my bones’ dust remains,
I wish to be memorialized as one of those recycled-plastic park benches,
where on the plaque, beneath “In Loving Memory of,”
my name is engraved.
I wish to be the place where young children rest,
tired after a morning full of play.
Though life grants them invaluable freedom,
they spend it as they may.
I wish to be the place where young minds can graze.
Seeing the stranger’s name on laminated plastic,
inquisitive kids pause to imagine who I was.
Their minds design stories of an adventurer, doctor, or astronaut,
and those stories are good enough as truth—
only they’d be left to say.
I live on in their stories, even as young memories fade.
I wish to be the place where, at midday,
young couples sit and sing sweet nothings into each other’s ears.
New romance riots before eventually dispersing.
Yet, life is free, people are plenty, and mistakes are always made.
Walking by me, days or years later, one lover could look
and chuckle as they hold their new partner’s hand.
I wish to be the place where an exhausted mother stops in the afternoon.
She thinks it’s nice to go out once in a while with her baby.
Upon the aging bench, she almost relaxes with the little one on her thigh.
The copper-colored sunlight illuminates her wrinkles;
“Work again tomorrow,
schedule a doctor’s appointment,
pay five-hundred-or-so dollars for the car tune-up,
not to mention running out of diapers,
and the rent is due soon.”
All these lines pass through her head as her child laughs ambivalently.
I carry both their weights.
I want to be the place where, at sunset, all these people could return to me as gray. They’d remember the emotions they felt whilst sitting atop my fading name,
feeling a connection with me—part recollection, part empathy.
After years of frolicking and questioning, freedom and anxiety,
their bodies at last find pleasure in simple comfort.
In the darkness, everyone slips away.
Childhoods, thoughts, loves, and worries
all dissolve into the past,
joining me. My name now is blurred,
yet some evocation of me still tenderly loved.
In those new and fleeting memories,
I can live and have some meaning.
Author's Note
The poem started off as a thought I had back when I was a senior in high school. I had struggled with suicidal thoughts and depression for years at the time. The mindset that I was in then was harmful, but out of it originated some type of romanticism. I kept thinking that if I was to die, I would have wished to have some small little legacy to leave me behind. Nothing egregious–not a statue or a building named after me–but something small, like one of those little park benches you pass by but never give much of a second thought.
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It was recently that I was walking through The Watershed in Edwardsville that a park bench with a strange name on it called out to me and I remembered that passing thought from years past. This poem is a hope that by the time I do die, I will have lived a life of love that guarantees a simple, beautiful, and worldly afterlife.

Nicholas Muppidi-Fowler
Nicholas Muppidi-Fowler (he/him) is a Junior studying History and International Studies. His goals after college are to teach Social Sciences, Spanish, and English as a Second Language.