I am letting go of all the painful memories.

Nobody deletes a memory. That is not a facility the mind offers, and it is worth knowing, so you stop measuring yourself against something that was never on the menu.

What changes is voltage. A memory that once took a whole day now takes ten minutes.

Later it takes a song, or the particular smell of a school corridor, and then it hands the afternoon back to you.

The change happens out of order and without announcement. You tend to find out afterwards — thinking of it in a supermarket queue and noticing that you kept walking.