I think one day all my memories will overcome me in a flood. One day the dam will burst and a torrent of images, emotions, and smells will carry me down a raging river, turbulent waters of all that made me the entity I am. I think I have built myself too much with the work of repression. Of denial. There is too much I have tucked away in the corners, and some day on, what is in the corners will fill up the whole room. There must be a threshold, I think, the proverbial straw that will make my mind buckle and yield, when one more thing I try to forget will make it all come back to me. The doors of perception will break open from the strain of all that is contained in the room they conceal. All of it, all at once, will show.
It may be a necessary thing, though, that I should face my past. And if I will not face it, that it will put itself in a place that I cannot hide from it. O, the things I have seen. I am not alone, though, am I? Everyone runs away from something, somewhere back in the past, no? Everyone hides from at least one experience of violent emotion and its throes, or cold and deliberate act of malice. I am no better, I am no worse. And perhaps I will be forgiven, in the end. But I do not look forward to the telling day when all my ghosts appear before me and demand reckoning. If you see someone on the street somewhere, frozen with a face of shock, that would be me. Be kind. Tell me I am still a human being.
