growing

Traumatic experiences really baffle me. It's not just the experience that confuses and ruins me, but how we grow and learn from it. My problem is holding on. I can hold onto the hurt and pain of a situation for eternity. We remember the sounds, sights, and noises of everything about those days. We remember the feelings, both hopeful and tragic, and everything we said. Maybe that's part of the pain, but for me it's starting to be part of the purely exhausting joy of moving on. The ability to remember -- albeit a burden -- is the only way I know to start to release the pain. First gather, then let go. Hold and release. We don't want to forget what happened -- but we want to remember how it feels to once again be in a good place. To look at our futures and grab on tight. Abuse changes a person so deeply -- their innermost childish memories somehow seem clouded. Three, twelve, sixteen, twenty years old -- at some point we were no longer children, but innocent enough to cry like we did as an infant.