She had, like so many others, spent her life placing her painful memories away into a little box. It was actually quite a pretty box as she imagined it; painted white wood with red and yellows swirls.
Each time a memory was stored away after a while so she could carry on with her life without constantly dwelling on the sadness in it. It allowed her to focus and surround herself with the good things, to be grateful for those.

This is how she'd survived it all, how she had appeared fine to the outside world and small talk people. Indeed, she still appeared fine. There was no reason to change her personal method of survival. It had worked until now and would most likely work for the rest of her life too.

However, the little box that already contained so much, and would no doubt accumulate more, wasn't always secure. Each experience brought an extra lock, each with corresponding keys and combinations. Only one was needed to open it, and once open, it is hard not to see the rest of the contents, so desparately locked in. It takes years of practise to ignore their cries for release.

But this girl had not had years of practise, not nearly enough anyway. Few people ever feel like they have ever had enough practise at dealing with the hard things in life; a good thing in a way.

It took only a smell or a word to open the box sometimes. Today it was the colour of a shirt she had noticed. There was no reason for anyone in the room to suspect it as a key; no one there was even aware of a box. Even your closest friends will never know everything about you.

Anyone who looked carefully at her then, would have noticed a glazed looked of melancholy come over her, if only for a second or two. In that second however, the memories and all their feelings passed before her eyes: Friends with broken lives, the deaths of loved ones, a grown man crying on his knees before God because there was no one else who could help, the tears she has shared with her lost best friend, the months of happiness she'd had lost with a single sentence, the starving child at her feet, knowing there were thousands more that she could never feed or help.
All these, maybe more passed before her eyes, as I said, we can never truly know a person's complete thoughts.

An instant later, she had blinked and re-adjusted her hair. The glaze had gone, the memories pushed back in. To the people around, nothing had happened. Even for her it was just a few seconds of thought that had passed in one day out of thousands, maybe as insignificant to world as she felt they were.