Protagonist Syndrome

Prolouge

Dear Diary,
I am not the hero of this story. This isn't about that. No, this isn't meant for me. I, I just- I am writing to you because... because I don't know how else I'll ever get a chance to. I'm not exactly the kind of person that gets the spotlight often, and even now, I don't think I really deserve to. This isn't my story to tell. And so, even in my own diary, this story won't be about me. I write to you, instead, to document this storyline to be sure that if anything happens to me, there will still be a narrative of the lives we have lived, told from a perspective no one would think to hear from otherwise. It's just like I've always known. In every storyline, there will be parts that can only be told from a bystanders perspective...

So let's start... from the beginning.
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My beginning.

I can't tell you where I was raised. I don't know. Not many people from my area do. Or at least... I hope they don't. For the love of my own sanity, if nothing else, I hope, I pray that they don't.

Let me explain.

In the corner of my mind, is a box of never-fading memories. Like a rare antique in a museum; painstakingly taken, perfectly preserved and ever aching empty space and time with their presence.

My childhood memories, few and far between as they are, appear picturesque frozen in the back of my mind... as if they were taken from a camera itself.

That is... If the camera in question was stolen from an antique store.
Because everything I do remember... aches on me, in voguish ambiguity. They have an ineffable ability to be effortlessly presented, sure, but they are still. Achingly still. So much so, that as the roll runs off the page and the video fades... you can see nothing but black.

You can still hear, after that, people rustling in their seats and struggling to find themselves in the darkness, again, like a cinema. But you see nothing.

Nothing, apart from the fire of an ended tape still burns still. The image is gone, but the production remains, in coffee-stained voguish nostalgia, every image imprinted in your mind carefully working detail by delicate detail.

Burning into your retinas, desperately trying to capture every moment of your life as if it may be your last. Even in darkness, your mind never stops reeling. My head never stops aching.

I can remember a young girl, her soft hair draped over her shoulder in a cornfield, the rest of her head covered by a flower garnished bonnet. She wears a puffed horizontally striped dress that something in my mind begs to remember is not something we could regularly afford. To the side of her is a corrugated shed of some kind, marked off by a hedge shrouded with pretty flowers. It's a festive time.
I can remember a boy with slicked up hair, and my instincts start to tell me that this boy is more maturely built than I ever was, or ever will be. He has a horizontally striped shirt, and he may as well be the only semi-attractive man I've ever met- uh, seen- that wears suspenders to hold up denim trousers and somehow still looks good in them. The image itself I have saved has him staring directly below the angle, holding his right suspender in his hand and looking up in the camera with his mouth slightly open in a mix of shock, suspension and awed disbelief.

I can remember the others as well. A young cloud-shaped hair on a small boy, wearing both a denim jacket and a denim pair of jeans over a white cotton T-shirt. A boy, potentially older (in flashback years) than even my current age, with a strong hairstyle, an established dress sense and a neverending sense of control and independence that radiated on to even the weakest of spirits.

I can remember a few other people too, scattered in with a whole plethora of indescribable images. Not enough to describe who they were, just enough to remember they were there.