trinkets

If you know me well enough, you'd know that I like using the word trinket to describe that place where I put my memories - good or bad - that have especially affected me. 

On a day when I feel down, I go to that storage room filled with trinkets, select one in red (the happy ones), open it up and savor the moment again to pick me up, and once satisfied I close the trinket and put it back in the storage room and close it behind.

You would think that any normal being would always only select the red trinkets. But not me apparently. Once in a while I take a good look at the black ones - the ones that hurt the most; the ones I wish to forget; the ones that made me feel like a worthless piece of shit. It's never been very clear to me why I do this, but the one thing I'm certain of is when I do, I'd bawl. 

Maybe I'm a masochist.

Sometimes though, when I know that I'm in the storage room and looking at the black trinkets, there's a voice in my head that tells me to stop. Don't go there, it says. Why'd you do that for? You got better things to do! It is when I listen to that voice and stop on my tracks, and indeed focus on doing something positive instead - that's the Cindy that my friends refer to as strong. That's the Cindy that everybody expects to be. That's the Cindy that gets dismissed with a "you'll be fine" because that's just my reputation.

Perhaps because I know it's (sometimes) necessary to wallow in sorrow. It's good to watch sappy movies about fictional love that conquers all, only to remember that this kind of bullshit is really just meant to be on-screen. Because in real life, love is meant to hurt, and life is meant to suck all the time from time to time. It's what gives meaning to our mortality.

When I look at my imaginary storage room, I can see trinkets of other colors too. There are orange ones from my days of adventure and fun and doing crazy shit. Gray for the ones when I've acted like an asshole towards someone. Green for the ones when I chose to do something right and humane. Many colors, yeah. Because you know what? No matter how shitty my life is at the moment, overall, my life is colorful. It's filled with many moments of magic and darkness and fun and stupidity and love. 

And because of that, I have one thing that I cling to that is the epitome of my survival: hope.

As long as I have hope, I will not jump off my balcony.