Faded photos

They never tell the whole story do they. When the pain has eased and the memories are not quite as vivid and when the good moments somehow overshadow the bad ones, the faded photos remind you of what you left unspoken. The mind plays tricks on you, tries to convince you of your own frailty, tries to get you to ignore, to gloss over the truth. And those faded photos guilt you into agreeing with your mind. You gaslight yourself, convince yourself that it wasn't as bad as you thought, maybe it didn't really happen, maybe it was just your own darkness that took you over, maybe you weren't really pulled apart from limb to limb. Maybe, just maybe, it was all a lie you told yourself, all a lie that no one ever believed anyway. Maybe it really wasn't the way you remember it. Was it?