During spring break, my eight-year-old insisted on playing school-school. After the math multiplications, we moved to an English composition part of her class. ‘What would you do if you were eight again?’, was the title of the slide she opened on a fancy presentation she had prepared. From a playful mood of pretending to be a naughty student, I immediately sank into a deep contemplation.
I briefly closed my eyes, allowing my memory to take me on a sensorial journey back to my eight-year-old life, to the eight-year-old self, who was oblivious to everything that was awaiting her within a few short years…
I clung to the sensations I hadn’t felt in ages, basking in the sunlight of my childhood backyard, where I would play for hours on end with friends, breathing in the long-forgotten aromas of my home on endless Sunday mornings, when we would sit all together, carefree, eating our leisurely breakfast, playing games. I took in every minute detail of my grandparents visage, each of which reflected back at me a sense of safety and completeness I felt in their presence. I remembered my summers with mom’s parents, in Dilijan forests, running up and down the hills with my cousins, chasing imaginary princes on imaginary dears on top of a big oak tree; the blissful afternoons at my other grandparents’ house, filled with music, singing, enveloped by a heightened sense of awe & love, basking in carefree happiness that seemed to have no end and no beginning..
I tried to cling to those memories as long as I could, holding my mind back from fast-forwarding the two years, when life as I knew it would abruptly come to an end.. when the dark cold nights of the war blockade would bring a different hew to our lives, when my parent’s enduring smiles would acquire a hidden but unmistakable trace of heaviness.. when my childhood dreams would transform into a shield of responsibility & never looking back…
Minutes later, I was finished writing my assignment, fighting tears in hopes of my daughter not realizing I was remembering the ten long years passing by in a fast blur of becoming strong & resilient, and leaving to oblivion everything I knew as that 8-year-old. I could no longer fight my mind bringing me back to the eerie return after the decade.. the return that was not back home, but to a new page of the book I once knew; the book that was now missing those key pages no matter how hard I looked for them. My grandfathers gone forever, my friends grown up, having become adults without me, my childhood dreams buried somewhere within all of the boxes of toys and books I had to leave behind.. and the careless laughter of someone that lived with her heart open, echoing somewhere far, being many closed doors on that porch of the sunlit kitchen..
I got up from the table and gave my daughter a hug of deep gratitude: for allowing me to reconnect to her, the eight year old that had not came along with me on a journey around the world.. who had stayed behind, for the lack of space..
None of the therapies or modalities I had practiced before had brought me this close to reliving this memory so deeply. It had to be my eight-year-old to help me find My eight-year-old, hold her close and ask her for to forgive me for having abandoned her there.. alone.. with all of her raw unfiltered dreams cut off so abruptly... and together rewrite a new story of continuity, completeness, and of re-membering those Dreams together.