• “Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.”
    ― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

    I've often wondered why it is that I remember.
    All those little nuances that make no sense, the hates more than the likes.
    The screams more than the cooing sounds of birds when I was a child.
    All what seemed to most important seem to be easily washed away by time; those thing that I would want to remember, to always feel, especially n the darkest times, but, no. My mind seems intent upon always bringing up the memories that have served to harden my heart against the reality that surrounds and keep on wanting to break me.

    I suppose that this is a kind of defense.
    But I don't want to defend, I have to accept and live.
    Instead I find myself over the bad gone and past again, and again and again,instead of seeing all the wonderful things going on around me even as I write this. It is one of the most confounding paradoxes of my being, I feel.

    I want everything, I want to do everything, just like when i was a child, but now I realize that I cannot see how. I seem to have reached an understanding, or mindset, that I am not capable of a lot of things, and it irks and I do not want to accept it. I have too much drive to be able to settle into nothing like so many seem to do for some inexplicable reason.

    I remember the games we played, and see how those games are forgotten. No more playing outside, chasing, hugging, fighting, crying. No more being with friends on a weekend's afternoon. Children have forgotten this. I have almost forgotten this. It is almost like it had been some sort of ideal dreamworld where all this had happened once upon a time, and now all that's left is a mass of hopeless, future-less, featureless children with no ties to this world, yet not even half a generation has passed since then, and I find myself afraid.

    Truly afraid.

    Where did it go wrong?

    Am I to blame?

    Remembering what I had had, I find the current situation very difficult to bear. Perhaps, if I had never known that happiness things would be more tolerable now. Regardless, I would not want to loose these memories of what now seems to be a Golden Era, though we were far from 'golden' at that time.

    I sit here, on the edge of a bridge, looking down at the river, watching as the teenager I could not catch before he jumped is lost far below in the grey waters.

    Perhaps he would have been happier with memories such as mine?
    I wish I could have given them to him...