Memento

Mood: Tired but can't sleep
Music: Nocturne in C sharp minor - Chopin

In a box on a shelf in my room, I have a plain, unmarked cassette tape. I neither touch nor listen to it anymore. It is enough for me to know it is there. My "Memento". It is all I have to remind me of one of the happiest times of my life.


In my life, I was extraordinarily lucky and blessed to have a moment-a brief time when the world was a watercolor of hope and the future was so bright my eyes teared and I had to squint to stand the sight of it. A moment when magic became real. A moment when I could fly. My moment was named Hana.


Before this, I was a different man. It was a dark time, seven years long. I was bitter and I hated. I was introverted and withdrawn. I was broken and I carried the hurt always. I knew what it was to be hungry, and homeless. There was no help for me, even if I knew how to ask for it. Most of the people in my life were very bad people. Alcohol and heavy drugs were my vehicles of choice; my own method of embracing oblivion. I considered them my own personal road to, what I hoped would be, peace. I was too chicken-shit to take the quick way out, so I did it slow.


I met Hana by chance. She was a slender, dark haired wonder with a smile and a laugh that would haunt your dreams. She could gather a room into the palm of her hand with it. No one knew what drew them to her, but they gravitated around her instinctively and were grateful to be there. She was too good for someone like me. I couldn't understand what she saw in me.


For someone so classically beautiful, Hana could see worth in the strangest places and most unlikely of people. But what she saw, she made others see. She looked at me differently than anyone had in a long time. She saw me as talented and strong and decent. She saw me as someone worthwhile. She saw what I could be, what I wanted to be, and she thought I was beautiful. And one night, in my arms, she looked at me with serious eyes and told me she loved me.

The regard of someone so precious, so amazing, made me reevaluate myself, my life. For her, I could be- I wanted and needed to be a better man. For her, I tried again and I have kept trying and though I fall down often, I have been trying ever since. She healed the last cracks in the brittle shell of my life. She was my angel and I was in love.



It has been six years since she left.



God sent me an angel. Though I never spoke of my past, she sensed the hurt in me. She fixed me. She made me a better person. And, when I was healed and stronger, when I could look myself in the mirror again, life moved her away from me and carried her on.


After she left, though I missed her so much I couldn't breathe and I woke from dreams of her with my chest aching, I was still whole. I could not dishonor the gift she gave me by backsliding. I would not fall into the hell she helped me crawl out of. I carried the memories of what we shared and I was a better person for it.

In a box on a shelf in my room, I have a plain, unmarked cassette tape. A "Memento". On this tape are recorded some of the last messages Hana ever sent me. Messages full of laughter and "I love you's" and joy. You can hear the joy in it when you play the tape, the joy she had in me. I don't touch it or listen to it though. Not anymore. It's enough to know it's there.