memories never fade

david burdeny - http://www.lumas.com/

But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

- The Cookie, Marcel Proust
C.K. Scott-Moncrieff translation

It just comes at you sometimes. A smell, the taste of ripe strawberries in the summer heat, morning light infiltrating the blinds, or a song that once represented a whole season. How the memories rush at you when you least expect it and hit you so hard in the chest that your eyes well up, brimming with sweet nostalgia. Would it be a lie to say I can recall what it was like to bask lazily in a cradle, cozying up to pillows and soft sheets?

And from there, the first time I scrapped my knees to the first sight of my own blood. At the age of four or five, we (the cousins and I) filled acorn shells with water that would collect in puddles after a heavy downpour and serve each other tea.

A boy stole a kiss when I was eight and I never let him forget it by beating him to a pulp as he conceded without a fight. I remember the feeling of losing something precious, that I never knew I had to give, in the first place.

After the innocent age of unknowing youth came adolescent and teenage rebellion lead by the extreme desire to want to know; to remove the veil of shelter and protection and to test the fairy tale ideals that my naive mind had once clung hopefully to. To know what it was like to do this or that. To know what it was like to feel this or that. and all for the first time.

Everything was a blur then and I can't recall succinctly any one singular event that changed me forever. But I have changed. and I've lost everything that made me innocent once.

Maybe I'm not ready to remember.