12,296 1/4 days

That's how many days I have been alive. (and yes you anal retentives, I counted leap years...hence the 1/4th)  11,201 days is approximately how long I have been old enough to have memories.  That would make me three years old and that's the first memory I had... busting my eyebrow open on the window sash and having to have it sewn up.  So, give or take a thousand or so days, that's a lot of days. That's a lot of memories.  Not all of those memories are good ones.  For some reason, I have an unusually evolved, technicolor memory.  I can remember conversations practically down to the punctuation.  OY!  However, I needlessly torment myself by remembering shit better left forgotten.  Keep the lesson, drop the memory, drop the baggage. A way I have figured out to do this while "peeling the onion" is to know, not pretending anymore, to know I only have so many slots for memories.  I no longer have infinite memory slots, now they are finite.  With this finite number of slots I now have to decide how to fill them.  What moron would fill them with bad memories?  Not I!! For example:  My friend AZ and I have had some pretty wonderful times together, things we both remember.  They have significance if for nothing more than to think of something good rather than bad.  A time when life wasn't perfect but together, it made us forget that for a while.  Hee hee, one night AZ and I were messing around, not sure how we even got to his place of employment, I'm sure he would remember that part but we weren't alone so we went outside.  It was dark, thankfully, and we walked around the corner of the building where this big tree was.  Before long I was pressed up against the building with his mouth on my bare breasts (still have NO idea how that happened so fast) and suddenly a helicopter with a searchlight flew over.  SHIT!!  Figured we were busted but actually a train had hit a car at the crossing.  Whew!  Anyway, years later AZ called me and told me they had cut "our" tree down.  Whaaaaa!!!  No matter, the building is still there and I still feel the brick against my back.  Another time, we were in the middle of doing things we shouldn't be, again in his place of employment although not the same place as before and, well, frankly, it was late and deserted but we just shouldn't have been there doing what we were doing for a multitude of reasons, however, there we were.  We heard a click and more noise... shit!!  Gonna get busted and luckily with a few nips, tucks and zips we were decent.  AZ goes to head off whoever it is, comes back in, I believe he may have been laughing, but it was just the fax machine.  BUSTED BY THE FAX MACHINE!!! Ha! Well, it happens.  I have a lot more stories about AZ and none of them bad.  Not that we haven't fussed and shit happened between us but I have no capacity to see any of it as bad.  It happened for a reason that was later revealed and he's the one person I can say knows the most about me, the honest, insecure me, and still likes me anyway.  I know a lot about him too.  It took him a lot longer to come clean with me about some things but now that I know, I not only still like him, but I like him better.   I realize that folks believe when you open up you make yourself vulnerable.  If you do to the wrong people, you are vulnerable.  To the right people, it only makes you more human in their eyes.  It proves you are fallible and imperfect, just like they are. I digress.  The memory slots... getting there.  So, there's two memories of me and AZ, this most wonderful, important person in my life and I will fill Memory Slots 1 and 2 with these memories.  Now, this is the hard part.  I have to give up 3 bad memories for each slot.  I now am responsible for giving up 6 bad memories.  For Memory Slot 1, I give up anyone who has ever made fun of me for being messy and making me feel bad about myself because I am.  I give up the guilt I felt because I called my host mother a bitch when I lived in Germany and she found out about it.  She read my diary, I deserved privacy.  I give up the hatred I have felt towards my mother for writing that horrible letter right after I went to Germany.  Now, I have to write that down somewhere else.  If I ever think of those bad memories again, I have to think of AZ pressing me up against that building.  Those bad memories no longer exist in my memory slots.  Good bye!! And so, it will go on and I will bore you or excite you with further details as they become available.  For now, I have to write down my lost memories and fill them with something good.  And... I'm writing a letter to AZ and I just had an epiphany.