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It's been a very long while since I posted anything. So long, in fact, that someone nice enough to comment on my last post had their words held in limbo until I released them. Sorry about that! Somehow time just slipped by (lame excuse but true) and I didn't get back here as frequently as I needed to. It's been a weird year in many ways. One of transition.
Planned letter writing (yes, paper and pen style) that started the summer of 2014 after a high school reunion dribbled into oblivion in the summer of 2015. I dropped the ball there too. My correspondent was diligent and kept her word to write. Plus her writing was ever so much more interesting than the "it's been hot here" or "sorry it's taken me so long to write back" kind. It was honest, dealing with emotions in a healthy way, and yet somehow it left me hollow. Not her fault for sure, but it couldn't live up to the kind of writing I was longing for. The kind that comes from someone who really knows you and has known you for a very long time. I was silly to expect that from someone who I last knew 45 years ago. But I knew her from grade school through high school so thought, perhaps...
Clearly it's my own impatience with telling my story to someone who doesn't know me that deep way that has tripped me up. I want them to already know everything so they can help me figure out the fuzzy parts. But those people - the ones who have that type of deep knowledge - if they exist for anyone, certainly are few and far between for me. An accident of life I suppose; people go away for various reasons or don't pay the kind of attention that we think they do. The dwindling number of those who remain over the years have imperfect memories. And the ones with the best knowledge who I should have asked long ago have died and taken their insights with them.
Maybe that's why over the past few months I've finally become able to lay down the expectation that there are definitive answers out there that, if I just get them, I will get it right. Know for sure. Really understand. Its long been time I've been carrying the expectation that scrutinizing the ambiguity that runs through my life, the gaps in memory, the unanswered questions, even sussing out the questions themselves will change the past. It won't. Can't. Of course I've known this, but it took me til now to be able to be done worrying with it. I finally accept the imperfectness of the past, of me and more importantly, of the future.
And I now understand that an imperfect past doesn't hold me prisoner any more than an imperfect future means it will be bad. I have the opportunity to learn and change. To improve. And that's really so much more interesting than trying to climb up onto and maintain one's balance on the shaky pedestal of perceived perfection. Maybe I should go back and dig out that last letter and answer it...
