In my home town apartment, I have a drawer full of random things.

Telegrams, drum sticks, festival bracelets, concert tickets, postcards. Random things that any other person, not knowing the story behind them, would mistake them for trash and throw them away. But for me, those random little things are a reminder of my past.

They remind me who I am and how I got where I am today. I am the sum of the memories attached to the items of my memory drawer.

I don’t open this drawer often. It’s contents are sad, happy, emotional, nostalgic all at the same time. So this drawer just sits in the corner of the room, waiting for the moment I unleash all the memories and feelings it contains.

I travel a lot, sometimes I’m away for few months. I have a different version of this memory drawer as well—a mental one—and the music triggers me to open my memory drawer. Instantly, I’m 18 again, partying in a rock bar in Ljubljana, dancing at a festival in Belgium or at the seaside with my high school friends.

Sometimes I wind up at my dad’s funeral. Everything and everyone comes back to me and, for a second, everyone that I left (or left me) are so close I can even imagine myself talking to them—telling them all the things I never said. Almost.

Some people were never meant to stay in our lives. They were meant to come, teach us something about the world, something about ourselves, show us all our potential and then leave. 

We hate them for leaving almost as much as we love them for what they have taught us.

Some leave because of unavoidable circumstances, others because of mistakes—ours or theirs. In the end they’re gone—at some point we remove the safety net and let them go.

There comes a time when we have to thank them, send them our love and say goodbye. It’s a bitter sweet goodbye but even more than that it’s accepting they are not here for us anymore, that they can’t be, but they will always be in our memories, in our hearts and everything we do.

So, hold onto the mental memory drawer because that’s where are all the meaningful people are who helped make us who we are today.

And from time to time it’s good to remember them, to thank them, shed a tear, laugh and then close the drawer and go back to the people that are with us now.

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Author: Katarina Tavčar

Editor: Ashleigh Hitchcock

Photo: flickr