Forget

2025-02-20

Prompt: write something that pulls from both a childhood memory (or something nostalgic to childhood) and a recent memory! explore how the two connect and differ

I don't remember much of my childhood, let alone the good stuff.

I don't smoke much anymore.

(bad high).

I have to be in a better headspace, otherwise it's just self-inflicted torture.

But sometimes I would smoke

(a little too much)

and I would have enough experience to know it would pass

(it always does).

Smoking, out of all things, taught me that;

everything passes eventually.

But in the thick of it,

sometimes I'd take out the journal,

and write everything flooding my mind.

I usually feel terror.

But it oftentimes unlocks a memory long forgotten.

Smoking does that for me.

I'd wonder if it was some magical gateway to connect with a long-lost past,

or just another emotional flashback.

I learned recently that a flashback is the body trying to resolve the unresolved,

and make sense of the unsensible.

Past versions of myself emerge from the gate.

I filed them away in junk drawers,

precisely to be forgotten,

to get lost in the clutter.

But there I am, younger

(always 13).

I hold my hand and tell myself it's okay.

Nobody was there for me then and nobody is there for me now.

I have to be the adult and say,

"I'm sorry. That shouldn't have happened to you. You deserved better."

I feel her terror and she feels mine.

I feel her boiling anger and wonder when I lost that spark.

We're connected, for this brief moment, until I siphon her away into exile.

We cannot both exist.

I say she's antithetical to me.

I say I've changed so much.

But I look at my face in the mirror and I see her.

At my core, I'm still her.

She's angry and she's been abandoned.

I don't visit her much and I'm sorry.

I can't look at the past.

I'll carry her inside of me, but she needs to be quiet.

My embarrassment, I can't have anyone looking at you.

I'll bury you in the dirt and pretend I don't hear you scream.

You're invisible and I'm invisible and we deserve it.

You really thought you were something?

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