A Memory You Won't Share

Why does my mind go to the darkest places? Write about a childhood memory, you ask. You may as well say: get thyself a sharp carving knife, the one that is good for slicing into the toughest meat. Sharpen the blade just a little more, so that it draws blood just by looking at it's glimmer. Now, begin to slice into the layers and layers that hide the memories you don't like to remember. Avoid that family holiday in Merimbula with the red parrots and the fish and chips, and the sun bright overhead. Avoid the memory of lying in the darkness listening to Pink Floyd with your old man on a hot night with the windows open. Avoid the time you and your sister made a go-cart out of a washing basket and four mismatched roller skates and got sunburn that kept you inside for two days. Avoid the memory of winning your first surfing competition, and the hours out on the water with the dolphins and the sparkling light. That's it, slice around that one. It's too pretty and too clean. It's too much fun. You might even enjoy that, and that just won't do.

Write about another childhood memory, I hear. Write about the one you shouldn't share. Write about the dark places. Write about that one. The one with the boy that moved away, and that you hope you'll never see again.

We never said a dark memory, you say. In fact, we showed you a picture of smiling children. Shouldn't this remind you of a happy time? Ah, that's a clever rebuttal. But you know as well as I do that photographs tell tall tales. Photographs are taken in flashes of fast shutter speeds and short squealing screams of smile, smile, before the children run off again to play, and are forgotten by the adults that presume you are off playing and having fun, because you never really know how to tell them otherwise. When parents ask you if you've had a fun day, you don't quite have the words to say, well, yes, but this strange thing happened, and I'm not sure what to make of it. Because when you're eleven, you're not sure what to make of the things you aren't sure what to make of, and you sure as hell don't want to put them into words. Hell, you don't even have the language to do so, and you might not ever.

And so, those memories get layered underneath the good stuff, and you pretend it didn't happen, until a thousand years later someone asks you to write about a childhood memory, and you start slicing.

I cannot name the boy. I can't even name the thing. Because writing it on the blockchain is like writing it in indelible ink all across the walls of your town, the one your family lives in. If they wake up and see it one morning, then there's no amount of rags and chemicals that can clean up that mess. But, dear readers, you know the shame of which I speak, because it probably happened to you, if you were a girl. Maybe it happened when you were younger than me, or maybe you were a little older. If you don't know the shame of which I speak, you are lying, or have covered it so well with layers that the sharp exploratory knives will never find it. But it's there. It's the memory that makes you squirm. It's the memory that you won't tell anyone - not your lovers, your husband, your best friend.

And you certainly won't tell the , however much you want to. No sooner do the words get typed, then the backspace rat-a-tat tats to delete it. The knife might be sharp, but the typist and editor in you is sharper, and keener, and more clever.

This is in response to a writing prompt and not neccessarily truth entire - but then, like all fictions, there are threads of truth and threads of lies, and sometimes they cannot be unwound.

---

---

https://gateway.ipfs.io/ipfs/QmU9f4FK9j91cnUGYk9hnMXuYdAFcnF6ekkpXZ5DfiByfG

@naturalmedicine II Discord Invite II #naturalmedicine

Discord 🧘About