It strikes me as weird how I have conveniently forgotten all of the negative facets of my childhood. I'm not really complaining--no, wait, never mind, I just complained. Silly me.
Normally this isn't the kind of thing that people are bothered by, and I get that, so let's just accept that I'm not your average everyday citizen and move on. I just find it odd that I've idealized what was by no means a happy time for me. I should have hated puberty, right? Why is it that all I can recall about my first crush was being completely and totally infatuated? There had to be some heartbreak with that; in fact, I know there was some heartbreak with that, I'm just having some difficulty remembering what it felt like.
This isn't completely random. I've found that unpacking boxes from moving to another house has a sort of "flashes-before-your-eyes" effect. I keep remembering things, like the last five seconds of my basketball team winning the city championship in third grade. I pulled the trophy out of the box and it was like I was there, with that snotty little kid pulling on my ankle as I tried desperately to keep them from getting the ball back to keep our three point lead...or something like that, I may have made up some of the juicier details (you'll never know what's true). And yet I remember that emotion, the excitement, the triumph. Where'd everything else go?
I have a feeling that my mind decided to cling onto some of the smaller details about my life to idealize it. When I moved, I kind of isolated myself in these overly simplistic views of the way things were. If you asked me to ignore my instincts, I was the most popular kid in school, I had tons of friends, and I was one of the best basketball players that there was.
I'm smarter than that, so I know I'm full of crap, but the memories are tainted somehow, like they got tampered with (first person who thinks of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince wins an unspecified prize). But I know what happened.
I sucked at swimming. I was never a leader in any way, shape or form. My friends were way smarter than me or way faster than me (take your pick).
My childhood could not have been very pleasant.
Why is it that we refuse to hang on to the pain we feel? A lot of the time, people say "you'll get over it" or "you'll move on". Well, why should we? We're supposed to learn from our mistakes, right? I know I made mistakes when I was younger, but for the life of me I cannot remember what the consequences were. I cannot remember being embarrassed or feeling left out or any of the juicy elementary school stuff.
Oh well. I guess I'm happy now, at least.
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