"A couple of weeks ago, I found myself crying in the park. It was supposed to be just a typical summer day. I was enjoying my usual stroll with my dog, Boni. The sun was shining, and the shade of the trees provided a very welcoming shelter from the burning sun. Children were running and laughing, and their joy drew me in. Two of them, tiny three-year-olds, were squealing, all happy, wearing Hawaiian-style skirts and flowers around their necks."
"I looked to the right, and there was the perfect birthday scene: a whole setup with tables, an abundance of food and drinks, balloons floating in the air, hanging by invisible threads, adults conversing with each other, and more kids playing in different spots. The atmosphere was so heartwarming that I immediately felt happy for the birthday girl. Inspired by the scene, I asked myself, " Oh, how were my birthday parties? " Blank."
"Oh my, I couldn't remember my birthday parties as a child past a certain age, no matter how hard I tried. It was as if I were walking to a place I was sure existed, and all of a sudden, I found a wall. Where the hell did it go? Why can't I see it? Why is this wall here? Immediately, I started crying. "I don't remember!" I said to myself repeatedly, sad and frustrated."
While walking in a sunny park with her dog Boni, the narrator becomes overwhelmed upon seeing a birthday celebration and realizes she cannot remember childhood birthday parties past a certain age. The memory blank appears suddenly, like hitting a wall, eliciting crying, frustration, and repeated self-reproach. The narrator identifies the last clear birthday memory as occurring before being physically and sexually abused, and recognizes the possibility that the subconscious has purposefully obscured later memories as a form of protection. The reaction combines grief over lost recollections with confusion about whether those celebrations occurred and how they felt.
Read at Tiny Buddha
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]