Time Capsule

Posted on March 9, 2021 by Apparently Catherine

If I am an adult, I must have once been a child.
If I am married, I must have said I do.
If I am a mother, I must have given birth.
If I am a friend then I must have spent time with others.
If I have scars, I must have been cut.

The rest is open to interpretation. Challenged by altered views and confusing thoughts, maybe nothing can be real when life is only seen through shattered perspectives, maybe coming together is our only chance to believe in our own existence.

It’s so hard to know what is mine and what isn’t, if anything at all was ever real or it was all just overheard stories, fractured dreams, forgotten fears. All I’m left with are a few relics from a past, both wondrous and terrifying stories, things I know happened but I can barely remember at all and with my mind left alone to try to logically fill in the gaps who knows what really went on.

Last week was a busy week, a great week really. No chemo, wonderful visits from old friends, lunches out and time spent lying on soft green grass under the shade of eucalypt trees and yet in therapy I imploded under the weight of ancient pain.

It’s nice when sometimes things can be verified by other people, I still find I need proof of my own existence.
Catching up with old friends helps me remember and gives me a chance to believe I’m real, that I always have been in some way because I existed back then too – and I know I existed because when I see them my heart aches with unbridled nostalgia.

Sometimes after weeks like this I end up feeling like I’m about to explode without any discernible reason. Not an anxiety, mania or anger style explosion, more like I’m so over full from life that there’s simply no room for anything more to exist within me.

Maybe it’s confusion with all the reminders of different worlds in which I have been part of coming back at once. It feels as though our mind is made up of time capsules, good and bad but all buried long ago and mostly forgotten until they’re accidentally dug up again, the contents spilled in front of me can sometimes more overwhelming than expected.

A perceived lifetime came from a single capsule which when clarified turns out to be a mere snapshot, what were remembered as years turn out to be just months and yet the rest of time seems to have passed by in seconds, apparently without me.

A million things have happened and yet I am suddenly finding myself stuck in the past somehow, unable to shake away secrets and sadnesses buried too in a time capsule with just a select few memories to remind me I am still here now, it’s 2021, not 1993. I had children, I got married, I’m middle aged, I have cancer, I never did learn to play piano…

The harder I try to look outside my time capsule the further everything fades out to the distance, a world blurry and incomplete, full of the unknown.