Puzzle Pieces

I: Boy with hair as bright as the sun.

My memory is like a puzzle. A puzzle with a few missing pieces. That 500 piece puzzle, that was nearly finished until you discover that three or four pieces are missing. You can still see the big picture, you know what the puzzle depicts, however, you’re missing some little details or rather some memories.

The big picture is me. Who I am and what my life is. The small details are what make a person who they are. Sometime I wonder why I remember the things I do and why I don't remember what happened before or after. I wonder if my mind is protecting itself from worse memories than what I remember? Or was I really just too young to form full memories?

I remember a boy, with no face and a bright blond hair, it looked as bright as the sun. We walked down the dirt path and talked and laughed. The words have long been lost; what stayed was the feeling of being grabbed, being pushed to the ground, and laid on top of. The feeling of physical pain is long gone, those long moments however are always present in the back of my mind.

This is a puzzle piece that's there, bright and visible. What's missing is the before and the after. I don’t know how i met him and how i got home after. I carried this piece and those missing piece with me for a long time. Until i met a group of girls in middle schools. I remember that we were sitting in rows in the auditorium for dance class. One day i confided in them about the boy with hair as bright as the sun.

To my surprise almost all of them had similar stories. One had a story about a little girl who was lying in bed, when a man she trusted, a man she called family, came into her room. He sat between her thighs, she was too young to know what was happening and why she was in pain. Too young to understand what happened to her and why a man she thought she would be safe with hurt her. I can't remember her name anymore, that year was the last time we spoke, i can barely even remember what she looked like now. Another beautiful girl with a haunted past.

Sometimes i wonder if i am who i am supposed to be. If i didn’t have missing pieces in my memory would i be a different person? Would the missing memory have shaped me differently than the pieces i remember did? Is the person I am now just a pale imitation of who I could be?