I don’t remember.

[ 25 minutes of free writing prompted with “I don’t remember”]

I don’t remember much of being a young child. Photos help spark familiar details like wood panelled walls, dark green pain, brown marbled carpets and velvet-like furniture.

My brain has always taken to a more visually included memory. I can recall conversations based on where I was, what people were wearing, or what I saw. What I have always struggled to bring back up to memory is how I felt or what I may have thought.

Was I happy before the age of eleven? I think so, but really can’t be sure.

Recently, while cleaning out an overstuffed closet in my old basement apartment, I uncovered a letter written by me to a best friend that had just moved away.

Up until Janis, most of my closest playmates and friends had been family — cousins, sisters, 2nd and 3rd cousins. Janis was my first very real and very close friend. She was a short bike ride away and I knew her home like my own. The white and black linoleum kitchen floor and the floor to ceiling entertainment unit in her living room I could paint from memory.

In my letter to Janis, who had since moved, I wrote of only stress and pressure. I was just eleven years old and in an un-sent letter to a dear friend I confessed my anguish over trying to lose weight, the pressure of good grades and how hard life had been without her.

I don’t remember those feelings, but i recognize them all too well.

Sitting there on the floor of my basement apartment my stomach began to turn and twist as i ached for this poor girl who had written this letter. My chest pulled further to the ground as i considered the familiar feelings of this girl.

The every-present drip of resentment for my body and my choices flooding my brain at every turn of a meal or clothing that still doesn’t fit quite right. The sink in the centre of my chest when a friend shows up to dinner in an outfit I would love to be in, but simply can’t. The boulder that rests on my shoulders and knees when I contemplate each minute decision as I design for clients all day. The joy-crushing knowing that this surely can’t be something a client may want. I watch the meal I cooked for my guests on their forks and am positive their light-up reactions must just be from a teaching to be polite.

I don’t remember being that girl with those feelings writing that letter but I know her well.