After the Storm

BREAKING NEWS:
I'm cleaning my bedroom.

Yes, I know. Amazing. Miraculous. Shut up. If I find Jimmy Hoffa in the wreckage, I'll let you know. Oh, and Chernobyl? Yeah, that's nothing compared to this disaster.

So anyway, I was cleaning today, and I came across my old diary. Not the nicest thing to find in my room, of course, considering my tumultuous past, but I read it anyway.

Bad idea.

There was a lot of memory trapped within the bindings of that little purple book. I have a highly selective memory, you see, and everything bad gets erased. So it was no picnic to stroll down a road splattered with the gore of my previous battles.

Lots of hurt. That's always fun.

But the thing was--I didn't react the way I usually do. I didn't just close the book and think for an hour. I wrote back.

I updated my little book, something I haven't done in two years. I added another three pages. I wrote until my hand hurt, writing quickly and effortlessly, trying my hardest to convey my emotions in words.

I wrote about everything. Everything that ran through my head. My dreams. My discoveries. My struggle to face reality. My struggle to find out what reality is in the first place. My internal conflict between what is right and what I thought was right. My inability to fend for myself in a world where self-defense is everything.

Every bit of pain or struggle I've felt in the past two years has been written down, to be remembered and read again. To be remembered.

I am not a coward. I can face my fears, my troubles, my memories. I can face my pain. I was once weak, once inexperienced, once a wuss. I was once dependent on the world around me to heal my wounds.

No more. I heal myself. I fix me. Arty fixes Arty. I will heal. I will be fixed. And I will be a coward no more.

Will you?