Hide and Seek - July 10 2026

 

Hide and Seek

July 10 2026



When words play hide and seek,

peeking out from under the bed

or crouched behind the credenza

as I rummage through the laundry

scour the garage.

The first letter comes to me

like a glimpse of cartoon eyes

beaming out of the dark

then blinking shut.

Too bad the-tip-of-the-tongue

isn’t enough to win.

I am “it”

and cannot hide

from my forgetfulness. 

Even olly olly oxen free

doesn’t end the game.

There’s only patience

and stumbling on the word

in the fullness of time.

Or waking up from a dream,

triumphant 

to find it there.

I’m too old for games

to play at this one.

Or have I regressed

to my second childhood?

A preverbal state

messing with pots and pans

on the kitchen linoleum,

conjuring imagined worlds

without using words?

Perhaps tomorrow, it will be my turn to hide.

I can only hope I don’t lose myself,

wandering off

in a confused state of mind

where no one can find me

and every word’s been lost.

Retrieval has become slower lately. I suppose this is advancing age, but am at least consoled that they almost always eventually come. The game of hide and seek may be a metaphor for dementia, but I’m not there yet! 

Distraction helps my seeking, because trying too hard seems to push my quarry further away. Trying too hard (and getting anxious!) is like dropping me into a blind canyon pushing against the rock-face.

Sometimes, as the poem says, sleep delivers the word — the unconscious mind, working overtime. 

It would be nice to think that my vocabulary has become so large, it’s just made a bigger thicket of words to plough through. Nice to think, but I doubt that’s how the mind works.

I probably started this poem because I’m now on the second day patiently waiting for this particular word  . . . and it never takes that long. So just now, I took the last resort:  using AI to find it. (If you’re curious, the lost word was “impunity”.) I feel embarrassed. Because this should have been as easy as finding a 3 year old hiding behind a coat rack, unable to suppress her giggles or stop from peeking out!