Tuesday, April 04, 2006
leave it.
i am having a hard time letting go of past events.
i've been poring over old emails and journals (back when i had a journal, before the blog ate it). i've been obsessing.
there was this guy i thought i was going to marry. we always assumed we'd get together some day, when we lived on the same coast, and it would be big. but then we put it off too long, and things got not good, and then one day we had a conversation and it was over. he said he'd write to me, and he never did. that conversation was the last time we spoke to each other. it's been five years. what happened?
there was this one time i fell in love and it was completely awesome and then it stopped on a dime. it seemed probable that i had either been wrong about the mutuality of the complete awesomeness or wrong about it really being over, but upon reflection, it honestly seemed that both were real. how did that happen?
when we were getting together, the monkey was going through a divorce. looking back, i'm surprised at how blissful we were, because some very difficult stuff was going down. it was the very beginning of love, and there were all these crannies (and not just crannies; entire cul-de-sacs, big unexplored neighborhoods) of each other we didn't know yet. who was he right then? how much of him did i know? when did we decide? how did that happen?
and i don't know why the objects of all this obsession are men who dumped me or were dealing with attachments to other women. apparently i am brewing some potent insecurity in here. there have been some other doo-dads, too, unrelated to romance: an argument with a boss that didn't go my way, a time i was embarrassed at a party. in third grade.
this is what i'm figuring out, though: the low-grade sad that feels so familiar has a lot to do with this. with not letting what's done have its proper place. when i'm happiest, these things don't seem any bigger than the average piece of life history. they seem pebble-sized. and when i am saddish, suddenly they are the riddles of the sphinx.
the past isn't dead, no question, and maybe it isn't really past, either, but it does step out of the foreground and fade a little. and this is me, pulling it out of syndication, puppeting it back to life, poking at it until its brittle limbs start falling off.
when we were trying to train my last puppy, my mom kept yelling, "leave it! leave it!" when he would take your cuff in his teeth and refuse to give it up, or take off running with a sneaker, or sniff obsessively around the trash can. it never worked on the puppy; he grew into a dog who chewed things and stalked garbage.
i really loved that dog, but he probably could have benefitted from some meditation.
i've been poring over old emails and journals (back when i had a journal, before the blog ate it). i've been obsessing.
there was this guy i thought i was going to marry. we always assumed we'd get together some day, when we lived on the same coast, and it would be big. but then we put it off too long, and things got not good, and then one day we had a conversation and it was over. he said he'd write to me, and he never did. that conversation was the last time we spoke to each other. it's been five years. what happened?
there was this one time i fell in love and it was completely awesome and then it stopped on a dime. it seemed probable that i had either been wrong about the mutuality of the complete awesomeness or wrong about it really being over, but upon reflection, it honestly seemed that both were real. how did that happen?
when we were getting together, the monkey was going through a divorce. looking back, i'm surprised at how blissful we were, because some very difficult stuff was going down. it was the very beginning of love, and there were all these crannies (and not just crannies; entire cul-de-sacs, big unexplored neighborhoods) of each other we didn't know yet. who was he right then? how much of him did i know? when did we decide? how did that happen?
and i don't know why the objects of all this obsession are men who dumped me or were dealing with attachments to other women. apparently i am brewing some potent insecurity in here. there have been some other doo-dads, too, unrelated to romance: an argument with a boss that didn't go my way, a time i was embarrassed at a party. in third grade.
this is what i'm figuring out, though: the low-grade sad that feels so familiar has a lot to do with this. with not letting what's done have its proper place. when i'm happiest, these things don't seem any bigger than the average piece of life history. they seem pebble-sized. and when i am saddish, suddenly they are the riddles of the sphinx.
the past isn't dead, no question, and maybe it isn't really past, either, but it does step out of the foreground and fade a little. and this is me, pulling it out of syndication, puppeting it back to life, poking at it until its brittle limbs start falling off.
when we were trying to train my last puppy, my mom kept yelling, "leave it! leave it!" when he would take your cuff in his teeth and refuse to give it up, or take off running with a sneaker, or sniff obsessively around the trash can. it never worked on the puppy; he grew into a dog who chewed things and stalked garbage.
i really loved that dog, but he probably could have benefitted from some meditation.
