If I had but One Wish...

When my sister passed away, I remember the day that I was asked to speak on behalf of my parents and I remember my answer being a firm and unchanging ‘No’.

One of the hardest moments in this world is needing to sit down and attempt to sum up a short 22 years of life spent on this Earth. Where do you begin? What can or can’t you say? People say ‘just start at the beginning and everything will fall into place from there’, but these people have clearly never tried to put down on paper, only that, which your heart can speak.  

It’s been over three years now since Kylee passed away and still, I find myself in my room, searching for music and thinking about her. Do I think about the last message I could have shared to the world about my sister? No. That decision is never one that I will regret. What needed to be said to her, was said from my heart to her soul.

But, I can't help but feel how unreal 22 years of her life was shared within my 28 years, when I can’t even feel her anymore and it’s at that point, where I question how emotionally connected we really are to the people who walk with us in our lives. 

The one thing we are certain to receive and keep, as our own, in this world, is the unbreakable promise of memories. What happens to all the emotions born from these memories though? Where do they go? I firmly believe that we have a file cabinet where all our memories go and as we age, the filed memories placed in the  30’s & 40’s of our lives, slowly start to be shredded to create space for the really important memories that will keep you going throughout Old Age and Dementia.

My question is: 

Where do the emotions disappear to, that made us remember the memories we save?

Like most humans, I fall into the category where I live my life based solely on my emotions. This isn’t a great connection to the world because living with emotions means that your days' happiness is based on what happened throughout the day. Living like this means that when I catch myself in moments of thought remembering everyone we lost, I can’t feel what I felt when they were still on this Earth.
All that I have left are the few memories of my sister and this does not satisfy me. 

Sometimes I want to feel the emotions that I felt when I was playing with her little broken pinky toe, or how I felt when I had to feed her, her afternoon tea, or how it felt walking around with her whilst my mom pushed the wheelchair. How do I remember a memory so clearly; how do I remember a person so completely when I do not have my emotions to guide me? All I see now when I close my eyes, is a blurry image where I cannot see her face or hear her giggle.

If I had but one wish, I would wish that we were graced with a filing room for emotions; because I know, with certainty, that if I could bring up the emotion I felt in a second, it would make me feel alive for a moment and I swear I’d be able to hear her laugh. 

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