Having flashbacks

Yesterday during the interview I told a couple prison stories. If this seems odd, it’s only because the position I’m going after is within a law enforcement agency and the questions they were asking were in direct line with my prison days.

It took awhile for the stories to come to the front of my brain before I could tell them and even then, they were a little spotty. It was as if they had to come from the deep vault I put them in, by way of searching the index card for their file number, grabbing the key, pulling the file out and on a slow conveyer belt, eventually making its way to the front of my brain for the memory.

They’ve been locked away for a few years, hardly ever accessed. On the rare occasion, one story will pop into my head or I’ll have the few and far between prison dream that’s very intense but other than that, I almost never talk about it. Sometimes I think my 6 years I worked there never happened, its such a distant memory that doesn’t seem plausible that I would ever do that.

After yesterday, it was as if the vault had been opened and left opened, because when it was time to go to sleep, there was a good 30 minutes when that’s all I could think of. And generally, thinking about prison stories before I sleep is about the worst thing I can do.

Memory after memory started flooding back. I started remembering the good, the bad and the horrific. Moments that had me chuckling and moments I had forgotten about that I was quick to tuck back away with thinking about anything good to overpower it.

Eventually I was able to stop thinking about it, and thankfully I didn’t suffer the consequences of it all in my dreams, but it had me wonder for a moment if I wanted this position because it has the likeliness of keeping this vault open. Getting back into this environment will no doubt bring back a part of the Emily I let go of when I retired 2 1/2 years ago. Ultimately I do want this job. A part of me craves being back into some form of law enforcement, even if it means not being an Officer, but it’s a matter of finding that balance that I wasn’t quite able to find before.

I think being older and *cough* wiser would help me in obtaining that balance. Sometimes I want to relive the “glory days” as odd as that may seem. As if I were more important then than I am now, and I want people to feel and know that. I know I’m important today, just in a different way. It goes back to the balance, I suppose, of being okay with where I am today since its in stark contrast to where I was or where I thought I’d be.

Its that contentment I guess, that I haven’t quite found just yet.

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