Someone I'm not

Woken up at 2:30 this morning by the sound of some outdoor activity going on between the girl's and boy's dorms on campus (I suspect fire drill followed by water-squirtings, as happened in my high school days in the self-same dorm), I struggled to get back to that blissful land of sleep. That, and an extremely sore lower back that's plagued me for days now.

Instead my mind somehow dredged up the past. The nasty past. The horrible past that makes me ill and ashamed.

You wouldn't know the me I was back then. Insecure to the point of running after attention - yet paralyzingly shy at the same time. Confusing love and sex - and being used by way too many guys as a result. Doing stupid, stupid things that should have had me dead by now - like racing a friend down a highway at 3 in the morning, doing over 200km/hr with the car lights off. Like unprotected intimacies. Like abuse of alcohol. Like subtle verbal crushing of those who actually loved me in spite of who I was.

The more my brain went into memory overdrive, the worse I felt about myself. I realized I used to be a totally crappy person, and was amazed that I'd managed to keep any friends at all! I WASN'T amazed at the number of relationships I'd managed to wreck, or at how there are some things inside me that srivelled up and died a long, long time ago.

I feel so completely different now to the person I was then. She's a stranger, and not a very nice one. I'm glad to be rid of her, though I'm still carrying some of her luggage. It's super-glued to my hands and I can't put it down.

But that's not me. Not anymore. I like to think I've grown up and left some of that awfulness behind.

Yet still it sometimes creeps up on me in the dark, reminding me of wreckage left behind...