One night I got up in the middle of the night and wrote this;

‘If everyone could erase just one memory from their mind, would we be the same people? Would we feel the same emotions? Would we make the same judgements?’

I am sure we can all think of something we would like to get rid of.  Mine is vivid and comes to me when I least expect it, like a tap on the shoulder.  Sometimes it’s more like a punch in the stomach.  I didn’t realise how long I had carried so much emotion locked up in this one memory.  This tiny part of my history, just a few hours really and yet the emotion of it had sat at the bottom of my chest where my ribs meet, for years.  Sometimes it would swell and reach up into my throat preventing me from talking.  Sometimes it would bloat and my sides would ache trying to keep it in.  Mainly I thought of it as a cactus sitting between my ribs.  I’m glad to say it’s gone now.  I feel a lot lighter without it and a lot happier.

I was abroad when I realised it had gone, after months of reconciling my emotions to past events.  Finally I was finding peace not fault in myself.  I looked in the mirror, and glanced down at my chest, obviously this pain, this cactus had never been visible to the naked eye.  The pressure had gone, my hand searched between my ribs just to make sure, it was definitely gone.  I was elated, I nearly gave myself a high five in the mirror, I was that happy!

On the plane on the way home I had a surreal moment when I realised I had let go, buried or even killed the child inside me.  It had been a long time since I saw the world through their eyes.  I knew that I now needed to be patient.  As I had learnt over the last few months awareness is just the first step.  I hoped they would come back and play in my imagination, we could have such fun!  However I didn’t realise the secret that that child held, no wonder they had disappeared.  That dark cellar had only just begun to reveal what lurked behind the shadows.

My book Sharks & Lovers is available to download here:

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