Old Wounds

I've actually had the time to work on packing up my room this evening. It's... uncomfortable. Not because I don't have enough room to work with, but because everything just brings up old memories. Everything is from a simpler time, before the summer of 2009, when everything fell apart. I tried on my class ring, and it's too small for me now. That's how I feel about a lot of my stuff: it doesn't fit anymore. That guy from before, he doesn't exist anymore. He was destroyed, and I'm what's left of him, plus some new things. I read through a journal entry I made the night my mom told me she was separating from my dad, and it was so passionate, and hurt. It reminded me that, behind the nostalgia goggles, high school was difficult, and our friends weren't always that great. It showed me the reality that I had idealized in comparison to what had laid in store for me.

I have a Harry Potter journal from ten years ago tucked away in a drawer. It's so old that it uses illustrations of scenes from the books, or artists' representations of items from the books, not even any pictures from the movies. My first entry was when I was ten, and behind the misspellings I saw how simple I was back then. I loved Jurassic Park, and that was the biggest thing to know about me. I didn't write in it again until I was 17, and it physically hurt to see just how soon it would be until this poor guy didn't exist anymore. Life was tough, but it was high school tough. He didn't know about actual life tough until the moment it would come at him and stab him in the heart.

I wrote a new entry, and, even though it ended optimistically, the process made me feel physically ill. I found pictures of my parents happy together, memories I had completely forgotten existed. There were old toys stashed away on purpose to keep my mom from telling me to sell or throw out, and they just reminded me of the hours I'd spend playing with them. There were too many memories.

Too many.