A girl looks to the stars and dares to dream~

My memory isn’t very good anymore; when I was a kid, this was my worst fear. I had multiple journals over the years and due to an intense and paralyzing fear of Forgetting Everything, I compulsively wrote as much as I could down. Through my tweens and teens, I recorded snippets of everything. Everything from film logs to transaction logs to prayer and calorie logs (dark times). They filled the pages of notebook after notebook that I obsessively collected, swearing each new one was my last.

Adult Me is less… well, that way, and that is because a collection of Happenings happened to me all at once within a short time frame and fizzled out the last of what I considered the normal wirings of my brain. Trauma is strange. I am a coward because I love to hide behind that word. I’m traumatized, but that doesn’t mean you get to know why. How dare you, Reader, want to know anything about the person you’re reading this from? You get to know I’m traumatized and maybe that there’s an explanation for why I am the way I am, but you don’t get to know the why.

Truth is though, I really don’t quite know why either. I am 25 and still don’t really get it, why I am this way. I have a green plastic frog nightlight (gifted to me from a dear friend) with a broken on and off switch that I can’t sleep at my apartment without. Sometimes, as the night hours drag on and I stare at the little plastic glow, I find my mind drifting. Not thinking. Remembering. But never quite.

Things come in little flashes. Bursts of emotion. Panic. Remembering. Something happened, and it may happen again. I’m brave, but not brave enough to handle that. So, I gaze at the green light and my mind tries to remember—why I don’t need to be so scared.

But I can’t remember, all of the time anyhow. My dratted memory. I am told these are emotional flashbacks. I’m going back to those moments, those Happenings. And I do remember something happened. I was scared. I remember why I felt afraid, yet cannot allow myself to make the connection with formality, say it out loud, confess it like a sin to a friend. Confess that I am scared because Something Happened Once. And it could happen again. Probably not, but maybe, and my god, that is enough to drive me insane.

Instead, it’s better to not remember. To stare at the green and smother the panic and the Remembering. When you forget, there is nothing to confess. Forget and then there is nothing to forgive.

I remember, I wanted to be a writer when I was a kid. Then Things Happened. Can’t really Remember, not quite. And then, suddenly, I was New Me. And I wasn’t a writer anymore.

It's rude. You're making someone take their time to read something you couldn't bother to write. You're telling them they were so unimportant you couldn't be bothered to actually take the time to say something yourself. And frankly, you're lying about it while you're at it.