Reflections on a hot summer's day

I am home tonight, in the house of my teenage years and all its tender blossomings. I do the same thing I always do whenever I return-- go through all of the rooms and touch everything - faded photographs, dusty knick-knacks, opening cabinet drawers and looking through them, breathing in the sweet dusky scent of familiarity. It is always the same, I see the same things each time I return, but fond reflection of days past has always been a favorite past-time, and I dutifully pay homage to the bittersweet embrace of my past and my memories.

Quiet time is ever so dear to me nowadays, but also ever so damning -- my thoughts are often the most unrelenting of tormentors, more wearisome than any interrogator because they just never stop. And so I have learned unconsciously to suppress them and drown them before they reach full resolution. Yet recently I have been experiencing abrupt flashes of memories, often of single scenes and places that last no more than a few seconds, of places and things I didn't know I had stored, and hadn't cared enough to recall before. Memories pop up unsolicited from many years ago, triggered by who knows what -- unusual because they are neither fond nor horrible memories, merely very benign and neutral experiences that seem a whole nother lifetime away. Ostensibly nothing special, but I guess they must have made some form of impression for they explode like lightning across the sky of my internal vision - flash once and then are gone, just like that. It is vaguely surreal, and it both jars and piques my curiosity -- that perhaps my mind is somehow "un-repressing" my memories behind my back and without my knowledge? Perhaps like over-taut springs wound back too tight they are now fighting back and making me take notice? I know not, but I will reflect upon this.

I flip through my old writings and notice that my handwriting has changed, taking on a messier and distinctively more absent-minded flair, speaking of a woman whose thoughts spill faster than her fingers can write and so who must rush her penmanship in a hurried kind of way. No longer the meticulously straight and perfectly spaced typewriter font of before, but rather now haphazard scrawl that belies the complexities of the adulthood experience and my inability to render life neatly into organized and fully cohesive episodes, anymore.