So I finally discovered how to embed a link properly in my blog the other day. Which is why, all of a sudden there are all these links to my other posts and stuff. I discovered how simple it is because my brother provided me with a dot point, step by step guide (which I’m guessing he probably stole off the Wordpress user guide if I ever bothered to find such a thing).
In my excitement I started trawling through my posts and linking things to other things. Reading through the ones from the last month or two are OK, I’m on a journey of healing and I know where my life is at, but then I went back a bit further and found myself reading about this life I truly believed in, with these people in it I truly loved, and these things happening that I thought meant something and, well to be totally frank, I totally lost my shit.
I started doing some editing. Just a few names and references to certain people. I wanted to put in a few smart comments in brackets, with all the wisdom of hindsight and all the poison of a woman hurt. I wanted to make some people disappear. I wanted to not appear so totally without guile. So totally blind and foolish. I wanted to say something else.
But when I originally (in true time) wrote those things, about that life and those people they were my truth. And just because it was not the truth to them or other people, it doesn’t make any sense to pretend my truth was something else. I miss “my guy” in a deep and at times ferociously gut wrenching way, but perhaps I do not miss the truth of him, just my truth, my story, the man I adored who I loved so blindly that my light shone out every shadow. Or my heart was open but my eyes were closed. It’s not the first time I have loved blindly, which is also why it irks me the most. But from here what difference does it make to change it? It can’t be changed in the past, that’s only possible in the present.
So I stopped reading, and I stopped editing. And in another year I will go back and see if there is anything that matters anymore or if I can be whole and happy with the story as it was and not want to alter it to make myself look better, or make out I already knew the lesson that was coming, or act like I don’t care when I do. Or maybe by then I’ll be writing a whole new chapter bravely edited at the beginning rather than the end, and I wont even care to look back there.
And then, my writing got interrupted because 9 of our friends came to dinner with my biggest girl and I – the most amazing meal catered from my kitchen, tasty morsel after tasty morsel, and candles and friends and laughter – mostly at, in true Aussie form, self-deprecating stories about some poor behavior or other involving too much alcohol and bicycles.
And I forgot all about ruminating in the past, even in the bits I wrote so beautifully. I meant them then, and I don’t want to take them back, but they can stay (unedited) back there where they belong.
