48 Going On 6: Flooded Memories

Today I traveled back through time with my sister. No, there was no special time machine that we crawled into. We didn’t need to hit a certain speed before takeoff. All we had to do was get into my Jeep and drive to the house we grew up in. Memories crashed into us like a car accident.

I’m 48 years old. But when we arrived at the property that was our home as a child I felt as if I were a young child again. Memories long forgotten came flooding back. Having my sister with me made it even easier to believe I was six years old again.

As I looked at the house I felt some of the same emotions I felt as a child. I felt the old fears. I remembered my fathers admonitions to avoid certain areas. They still felt forbidden 30 years later. Am I still not allowed to go there?

Of course a lot of things change over time. Trees grow and die. Buildings fall apart. Nature takes over when things are abandoned. Roads become impassable. Yet the spirit of the place remains.

Some of our original memories have been skewed. Perhaps over time our own memories have had to change to fit certain scenarios we had built up in our heads. Now, faced with reality things look different because they are different than we expect them to be. In reality they have never changed.

My trip today was filled with anxiety. My sister felt it too, at the same moment I did. Both of us being empaths, it was hard for us to determine if one or both of us was feeling the original anxiety or who was channeling the other’s true emotion. In any case, we both felt a strong heaviness in our chest.

I’m a lot older now. I’m more experienced in life and more understanding when it comes to emotions. Still, when I return to that property I forget all about being an adult. Almost without thinking about it, without any control over it, I revert back to being the little girl who walked all over the area without a care in the world.

Memories are neither painful nor pleasant. They just ARE. They only exist. Our reaction to them makes them painful or pleasant. I hope that in facing the painful ones I can mitigate the pain until they are neutralized. And I hope I can save the pleasant ones to return to later. Maybe even when I am 58 going on 6.