The Ghosts in Our Minds: How the Past Haunts the Present
It’s funny some of the things that can stick in our minds for years.
Sitting here thinking how things have changed so much since I went to school, hell the whole world has changed since then. I’m sure many things have changed for everyone. I remember being so carefree and not caring about anything.
My friends and I used to jump off of a highway bridge. I forget how high but it was super high. Very scary to jump when it was your turn. Legs would tremble from the height. looking down into the water was a huge mistake. It only scared you more. We walked across a small beam that if we had fallen way before we got to deeper waters, we could have died or seriously injured ourselves. It was all rocks under there. What are the things you remember from your school days?
No one had a cell phone when I went to school. We wrote letters to each other. Passed notes between classes to tell our friend that Joe yelled at the teacher and got sent to the principal’s office. By the end of the next class, the whole school knew what Joe did. The switch between classes was a catch-up time. If anything else happened that we didn’t get to write in a note then we would talk about it in the five minutes we had to switch classes.
I remember fashion was way different than today. We rolled the bottom of our jeans tight on our ankles and wore two different colored socks on one foot. Now pants are like the 70s are I in style again? Something I don’t think I could wear. Would you? Have you seen some kids dress like this or bring some other style from the past back? I can’t believe I found a video of the pants being rolled. This is how we did it in the early 90s… if you are curious about how it looked. 🤯
From the sounds of this video, it may have come back in style😮
Why are there some things that stay in your mind all these years, some have no reason to stay and some do. The weirdest, most insignificant thing can stay in our minds. The one thing that has been on my mind lately is something that also happened in the early 90’s. My mind keeps playing it over and over for some reason. A stain on a chair. This nasty brownish stain on the chair is something that will not exit my mind. How the stain got on this chair is the main reason I think about this stain. The stain was left by a dead man. My grandma’s brother. He died in the chair and that stain was left. Why have I been thinking about this lately?
Do you sometimes think of things from your past that you should not even remember?
I suppose we all have things in our past that we wish we wouldn’t remember but we still remember. I get why this is something I remember. I just don’t get why my brain has to mainly think of that stain before I think of the death.
The stain should not even be a thought. I never met my grandma's brother. He had lived an hour or further away from us. We went to clean out his house. She had been the only living sibling left. He was widowed for years. I remember being scared to walk into the living room to see that stain, it scared me. The house even had a scary feel to it. Even though my mom, my dad, and my grandma were there, the house seemed quiet. It seems a quiet, calm settled in the house. Was very weird and scary.
I had always been scared of death. I do not think the funeral I remember going to was my great-grandmother’s and I know I was very young. I still remember walking up by the body one time and being too scared to see her again. I had no clue what was going on. Maybe my parents had explained to me and I just don’t remember. I think if they had, just didn’t explain it well enough to still have me scared of death today.
My dad’s friend used to come over almost daily to get high with him. I got to know him. He was a lot younger than my father but they bonded over one thing. Getting High. He was very nice to me. Unlike my father’s other friends who never really said two words to me or just a hi and nothing more. This man had conversations with me. I think we were closer in age than my father and him. I was in high school at this time so I was around 16 or so.
One day I came home and found out he had shot himself behind a tree at a park only three or four blocks from where we lived at the time. Was a park I had gone to many times. Found it very hard to go to that park after. If I did end up going, I stayed away from the trees which was easy. The playground and the sunset bench were on the main part of the park and the trees were on the other side of the parking lot. Still made me think of him and how he died every time I went there.
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