Memories

Memories slay me. Completely, totally. And try as I might, I can't block them or reconcile myself to the fact that they are just that, memories. I find myself succumbing ever so often to those memories. Of times when I was more secure, when life was less complicated and one had people who cared and who one cared about nearby, when I was in a better place literally and figuratively. We all move on, adapt, live life as we have to, but we always carry along memories of what was, what could have been, what one wishes could have been... and try to come to terms with the fact that the past, beautiful as it was, will never be back. For a while we let our minds drift back to those times, those faces. We allow ourselves to clutch at straws, consider improbable what-if scenarios, hope against hope. And then, once we calm down and learn to accept reality, we build mental barriers to carefully file away what was strictly in the past, and concentrate on the present and the future...

I thought I had accepted reality. I thought my defences were in place. But they are no match for the flood of memory. Closure, in so far as I had achieved it, has been shattered in an unsettlingly easy manner.

People, places, emotions, experiences. Some of them, I took for granted and never accorded the special status in my mind and heart they deserved. Others, I assumed naively would either be with me throughout my life, or could be dealt with easily when they ceased to be a part of my life. News flash, rude shock, slap in the face. All this while, I thought I was a guy of reasonable emotional stability, only to be reduced to a quivering mass of nothingness by a few mere words, a few images, a few short flashes of buried memories. A phone call out of the blue, a short meeting, an 'Online' status on GTalk, a jpg file dug up from the distant past, a sudden and unexpected Instant Message...

Some things, one thinks will be easy to let go of. Maybe. Over time, one expects they become a little manageable. But one brief glimpse is all it takes for the carefully built walls around a memory to collapse, leaving one weak and vulnerable and open an attack of nostalgia, love, remorse, hatred and all the surprisingly strong emotions one had thought were dead or buried for good.

All those cliches about the past are crap.

"Forgive and forget"? Crap.
"The past is gone, ne'er to return"? Crap.
"Out of sight, out of mind"? Crap.
"Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all"? Crap.