memories

I was afraid to fall asleep, but staying awake also brought back painful memories. Memories I sometimes wish I could wash away, even though I am aware that they are an important part of what my life is; who I am now. I stayed up all night, anxiously waiting for daylight, so that I could fully return to my new life, to rediscover happiness I had known as a child, the joy that had stayed alive inside me even through times when being alive itself became a burden. These days I live in three worlds: my dreams, and the experiences of my new life, which trigger memories from the past.

Yes, memories do haunt. Memories of a happy past, in the expectation of a bleak future, in a sad present. - Anita

To invest into a memory that will only take you down a road that cannot be traveled is futile and counter-productive. It takes us away from the here and now, and it only impedes our well-being when we give nostalgic cadence to this venture.

A past will never die. It's always there and always present as long as your living breathing and able to remember.

Trap yourself inside your own brain, switch off the light, block all the escape routes, then turn your back on everything you know to be reality and try and survive there. Try. Living. Nowhere.

It is not our memories but the person we have become because of those experiences that we should treasure. This is the lesson these keepsakes teach us when we sort them. The space in which we live should be for the person we are becoming now, not for the person we were in the past.

They were all gone now, broken or taken by people who had no idea what such items represented. Let them go. She held the past in her heart, with no need of physical items to tie it down.

Ephraim lifted the top of the trunk. Neatly stacked were mementoes from what seemed like hundreds of journeys. Right on top was an etching of the Eiffel tower next to an African mask that looked at him with surprised eyes. He reached in a little deeper and unearthed a small teapot decorated with blue drawings just like the kind his grandmother collected and kept in a locked china cabinet.

Nostalgia is your brain's way of photoshopping the blemishes of your past.

Bad memories were hard enough, but it was torture to be haunted by the good.

What I am searching for is the gaps - the silences. This is how I see the past: as an excavation. You sift through the rubble, pick up one fragment here, another there, label it and record where you found it, noting the time and date of discovery. It is not just the foundations I am looking for but something at once more and less tangible.

One can never ever forget the one who they loved in their past and that to their First Love!!'Whenever and whomever it was, your experience with your first love is etched into your memory forever..

Sweet as the past may be, it best remains pressed between the pages of memory, savoured for a moment or two on quiet Sunday afternoons.

Maybe the problem with holding onto memories so tightly is that they don__ allow us to make room for the future. Maybe the gentle decay of the past is a blessing that dulls the sharp blade of regret, allowing the possibility of rebirth.

Once we get to know where and why the skeletons of the past are buried, we can start wading across our muddled memories into the open plains of a new horizon. ("Going back to yesterday")

All things fell into the past but one; and what that was, was love.

We imagine that we remember things as they were, while in fact all we carry into the future are fragments which reconstruct a wholly illusory past. That first death we witness will always be a murmur of voices down a corridor and a clock falling silent in the darkened room, the end of love is forever two spent cigarettes in a saucer and a white door closing.

Those happy memories now added to my sorrows.