While cleaning through my room, I found a bunch of shoeboxes tucked into the back of my bookshelf. I admit, I knew they were there, but a part of me had forgotten those parts of my life. The outsides said "Freshman Year," "Summers," "Junior Year," and some guy's names that are completely irrelevant at this point in time. Looking at one of them, I felt like something was wrapping itself around my neck. It was the familiar sense of strangling that I knew all too well for almost two years. I stopped for a minute, and realized that I would never have to deal with that again if I didn't want to, and that fact alone reassured me. I pushed past that box, contemplating just throwing it away when I was done, and found one that gave me all happy memories at this point. Before I even opened the box, I remembered the beginning of it all. Some summer afternoon in the middle of a nap, I got a phone call. I spent a good two hours reading the letters in that box, looking at ticket stubs, and things that had decorated the locker we shared. There was a letter to "the only girl I would walk four miles for at 5am" and I found myself remembering those times. That fall we shared was a blur, mostly because it was so many good times spent together. The winter came with the kind of destruction it can do to pull people whose relationship is based on warm weather. I remember saying goodbye at school for winter break and then everything changed. That was goodbye to whatever was normal, goodbye to our fall together and goodbye to the hypothetical fall. The months to follow can be summed up by busying myself with other things as to not have to think. And in that spring came my time tested theory that rather than being upset, I'll just find something else to spend time thinking about. Enter what can be best described as two years of not letting myself feel upset or remorse for things that had gone wrong. When one relationship ended, I had already found something or someone else to amuse me. And you know what? I don't feel like any worse of a person for doing that. Rather than be upset as what I'd spent a year and a half working towards self destructed, I fell in love with a world that was completely different than what I had become accustomed to. And rather than feel like a year and a half of my life was missing and had been pointless, I felt absolutely fine. I eventually found that my distraction had could stand Greek Islands and hotel courtyards, but could not hold its own on American soil. And then began more distractions.
Looking through those boxes was an mixture of a lot of different feelings. I found things I related to people I wouldn't dream of talking to today. I found things I had completely forgotten about up until that moment, and most of the time I found myself laughing at how dumb I was when I was fourteen, sixteen, and even eighteen years old.
I love remembering things; looking at pictures, hearing songs from a certain time in my life. Memories the first time you really look at someone you haven't seen in a while. You either get that warm feeling of recognition, or you realize you never even really knew them at all.