Turn the Page

I open the heavy album and look into my paper memories. Highlighted life looks back at me…content, happy, full. Bright colours, special moments, white grins…all captured in a frame, so that someday I might look back into each picture and glow in the warmth of its recollections. These photos, the legacies of the life I have led so far, speak of my experiences, my friends, the travels, the adventures and more. Each, a window into a moment, telling a story of the person that I am, of all that I’ve valued through time.

But there are spaces between each vibrant picture in its tidy white frame…spaces filled with invisible moments that do not want to be remembered, that carry too much hurt to be remembered. The prizes that couldn’t be won, the love that promised and then went away, the friendships that destiny cruelly discarded, and the wounds that each loss seared across the heart.

Maybe good times aren’t meant to last forever. Maybe that’s why we save them in the recesses of our minds, sometimes, on paper; proof that we have lived these moments, and enjoyed the offerings of those special times. Our memories recall the vivid shape of joy, whenever happiness seems hard to imagine.

Yes, remembering is important, and yet, forgetting, even more so. Because in a world where pain outweighs happiness, it’s easy to get stuck in a moment. And forgetting is the only way we can let go and move on.

I turn another page.