Resolving My Past

Resolving My Past

I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek. That was a long time ago, but it's wrong what they say about the past, I've learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out. Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years." -Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

My mind/body holds memory

I have such a thing as an unconscious in which I store the dark memories that feel too overwhelming to really bring into the light of day. I hear a lot about letting them go, about not dragging them into the present, but how do I do that? These are memories that were seared into place in the sheer heat of some hidden moment, memories I have driven down inside of me. I've given them different names, rewritten them a thousand times so that they are so layered with explanation, rationalization, and revision that even I cannot retrieve them from that baggage claim inside of me. They are almost unrecognizable. But then, in the clarity of some instance, in hearing another person's story, in getting triggered by who knows what, there they are. Stark, elemental, wearing the same old clothes they wore then. Fully breathing and alive, seemingly having no idea that they have been banished. There they are, shaking and furious, as if they are happening all over again.