My inner child

I think I may just have thought of a possible reason why there are certain things wrong with me.

I've heard talk of peoples' inner child, blah, blah, blah. I think, with the shock of something that happened to me at age 5, my inner child died. I don't think I consciously knew it happened. But subconscioulsy another part lay that child in a grave of sorts where it's been rotting ever since. I don't know how often an inner child dies, but I'm sure it's often enough that there are certain protocols to follow in burial so that there is no lingering suffering for the survivors.

I get an image in my mind of this monster warehouse of Me. There are tons of boxes and folders everywhere on shelves for as far as the eye can see. They're mostly memories, subtitled with names of individuals involved and the like. But in the sub-basement, after going through a maze of other stored things in other rooms, there's a smaller room. It's more of a closet, with odds and ends piled every which way.
Well, once you shove some stuff to the side and squirm under some low tables; back in what seems the dustiest, smallest corner, there's a small box; hardly larger than a shoebox. The label on this box reads 'Inner Child'.
You barely realized it before, but there was always an odd smell to this memory warehouse. You had just chocked it up to the fact that there was tons of old stuff around so maybe it was just a smell of 'old'. Now, however, you realize that the smell has been coming from this room. It's sort of tangy, like spoiled meat. And it makes your nostrils tingle and twitch, as if trying to avoid the smell that is everywhere.
That smell has been coming from this very box. As you open the lid, the smell wafts up to make the eyes water a bit.
What's inside may look like a pile of old, worn out leather, but a closer look reveals more. Tiny hands and feet are an immediate give-away. Empty eye sockets and a mouth with tiny teeth tell the rest of the story. There is vague recognition on your face; memories that have become mere snapshots of a 35mm camera as time has moved on.
You and this little girl used to play together in the well-lit upper levels. But one day she seemed different; diminished somehow. She no longer wished to play as often and she seemd sickly much of the time. It looked as if she was shrinking from the inside out. And like she was just drying up.
A small part of you knew what had happened and was happening to her, but you had no idea how to fix it all. You could tell someone else, but would they understand and know how to help?
When you two weren't playing, she would venture into the lower levels. As time went on, you'd accompany her. It was an unspoken rule that no lower level boxes were to be opened. It was a sure death sentence to open one of these boxes if you were untrained in how to cope with what was found inside. These boxes would just suck the life right out of you.
Looking back, that must be what happened. She had been trying to find THE memory of THAT time when you were five years old. Maybe she was trying to find his name. But, in searching through all these boxes, she was slowly being drained of all life. The Inner Child is much stronger than he/she appears, which is probably why she didn't die outright, and why you only remembered a little at a time. As she opened boxes, those memories would slowly weave their way to the upper levels to become part of the mass of conscious memories.
But, one day you came down to find her, for she rarely ventured into the light of the upper levels anymore. You found her curled up in a corner, as if asleep. But you knew it had finally come to an end. You found a box that was just the right size, lay her drained and lifeless body in it, marked the box, and hid it away. Hoping, and fearing, that someday a professional would come along and be able to find what she was looking for without they themselves dying....or leaving.
Even you aren't strong enough to open a lot of those boxes. To try and open them anyway would be foolish, not to mention dangerous.
So, you sit and wait; in your memory warehouse. New memories come in and get filed. Old memories get stored away. But, there's always that smell. That faint odor of spoiled meat. Sometimes it gets so faint that yo ucan barely detect it. But other times, a new memory comes in that, for some reason, intensifies the odor.
And still, you wait. Wait....for something. Wait.