Sometimes when I think about things that happened to me when I was quite young, I don't think of myself as being so. I know that, objectively, I was considerably younger and less educated than I am now, but I still consider myself to be just as capable, and roughly just as large. And then I piece together the two unavoidable facts of my age at those times and my brother's age on Friday, and I am shaken to my core. There are things that I did and things that happened to me -- things that so many of us did or that happened to us -- at those ages that may actually kill me if my brother had to go through them. How are children, so fragile and innocent and naive and pure and formative, also so resilient? How is it possible that perfectly capable, confident, and strong people such as myself could come from things so terrible? I always tend to compartmentalize events into specific boxes, forgetting that when my brother had cancer he was the same age as my baby cousin, or that when my sister was my brother's age she had already had a Bone Marrow Transplant, or that when I was my brother's age I was ignorantly preparing for the most traumatic years of my family's lives? We say to never grow up, and yet sometimes the things that are worst in our lives are based wholly in that time before growing up. Child genocides, child soldiers, and child molestation are so much worse when you think about what you were doing at that age, or when you think about another child you know who is currently at that age. It's always possible -- and always emotionally easier -- to hold things separate from reality. But when you take the terrors of another life and play them over your own (or over the life of someone you hold dear), those terrors become real. The pain becomes yours, but still to such a lesser degree that thinking about it for too long feels like bleeding from cuts never made -- wholly terrible, but mostly just because it's also incomprehensible. There are pains I can never fully imagine or comprehend. And then there are other pains, pains so real and present to me because I lived through them myself, that the only appropriate reaction to realizing that you were almost the same age as your perfect, joyous brother when those pains were felt is to get on your knees and scream. Or, if you're like me, to write about it.
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I'm Audrey, a college student and existential rambler.
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February 2021
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