Memory
It is a month later now. Wren has been going through something that feels painfully familiar to me, something close to the days I once lived without understanding . today he texted me, excited, talking about learning psychology and trying to understand the human mind and anxiety. I felt briefly happy for him. he sounded genuinely alive, like someone who had finally found a door he wanted to open.
Wren is not usually the type to dive into these themes. he is into anything but interoception, so when he spoke with that kind of curiosity, it caught my attention. then he said something that touched me. he said there were no days he hated himself more than those days. the moment I read that, I felt tightened inside.
I have had a unique friendship with someone who, on the surface, could not be more different from me. his name is Mahmoud. when I first met him at the university of Khartoum, I was almost certain that we would never become close. not because of conflict, not because of incompatibility in values, but because he represented something I was instinctively afraid of.
I’ve learned since a young age that time will pass.
not moments with loved ones.
not revolutions and the race to wealth.
not the one we age because.
I’m slowly starting to form an answer. the three years I wrote about were not random. they were shaped, heavily and quietly, by days I still don’t understand , and I keep discovering this, a little more each day. those days are becoming one of the most important chapters of my life. so dense, so unprocessed, that it has taken me years just to begin understanding what happened there. and I still don’t have the full image. there is something I haven’t yet confronted, something I’m not ready to name, sitting at the center of it that I keep circling without going in. What I do know is this: I feel like I got caught there. like I locked myself inside those days without realizing it. like there is a version of me that I left behind in 2023, specifically at the University of Khartoum, and never went back for. a version I am too afraid to think about clearly. I didn’t choose to abandon it consciously. I just never processed it. and when I try to understand why, I find nothing. not resistance, not pain, just absence.like a self discontinuity: when something ruptures so completely that the person you were before it and the person after it don’t feel connected, just splitted. it is not like growth, the I outgrew something. but like.. the way I imagine it, something that was never finished, yet I closed the door.
I’ve never bought a bottle of fragrance twice in my life. I realized this at twenty one, and the strange part is that I already knew it, I was consiocly making the decision of changing into a new bottle, new brand everytime, I was never a one fragrance person, I just hadn’t looked at it directly, or more inwardly. I’m obsessed with fragrances. I own them, I seek them out, I know what I like. and yet I never go back to the same one. although some were very good and hard to replicate, once, maybe twice, and then it gets tossed out. never buying it again.
Growing up isn’t the problem, Forgetting is.
- The Little Princess