The magnitude of history

It’s my usual Sunday night, me rummaging through notes and notebooks, editing and writing. I stood up and went into my writing closet. Realizing that the binder I wanted was at the very top, I stood on a stool and yanked at the bottom of the stack. Swiftly it all came toppling over me, hitting me in the head in the process. Papers and folders scattered everywhere.

I grunted. I began picking them up one by one when I ran across a manila folder gently titled “WEDDING” in block letters, with a red heart sticker following the word. I’d forgotten I was planning a wedding. I slid slowly to the floor till I was sitting and I began to go through its contents.

There were lists of first dance songs and father/daughter songs; clippings of flower arrangements, swatches of fabrics, notebook entries of budgets, and location listings. There it all was. Very detailed and organized. All I ever dreamed of, all I thought I ever wanted. And on the last page, on the back cover of the folder, a pasted picture of me and him. I ran my finger across his face and it took my breath away. Your past is always your past. Even if you forget it, it remembers you.

It didn’t make me exceptionally sad. It didn’t make me miss him. It just made me painfully aware of the magnitude of the history. One that by placing on a top shelf, in the back of a closet, I had hoped to forget. Except I couldn’t forget, I couldn’t even move on from it without first acknowledging its presence.

The truth is I’d tried. I followed the ill-advised sentiment of the Mexican saying that goes “un clavo, saca otro clavo”. This to say, that it is the belief that to get over someone or to forget someone you have to simply fall in love again. That another nail will drive out the already preexisting nail. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t fall in love. Instead I butchered the attempt because I simply hadn’t correctly healed, nor had the correct amount of closure. In order to give your heart away you have to have one to begin with. And mine, well mine had simply gone.

It’s true. You don’t always get the perfect moment of closure. Sometimes you just have to do the best you can under the circumstances. And till that moment, I thought I had. Except my past still held chain and shackle over my heart. And I didn’t know how to break free from its grip. And all my best intentions kept making an even bigger mess of things. Because that is what happens when you try to run from the past. It doesn’t just catch up, no. It overtakes. Blotting out the future. The landscape. The very sky. Until there is no path left except that which leads you through it. The only one that can ever get you home.

They say that if you don’t pay attention to the past you’ll never understand the future. In my big attempt to let things go and put things behind me, I had managed to miss the biggest lesson. That it had happened it all. Despite our differences, we did have history. No one understood where I was coming from the way he did. I’m not sorry that it’s over but I am sorry for the way we let it end.

The night that we broke up was the last time I ever saw him again. It’s been over a year, and it is still hard to comprehend that a person that was such a big part of my life for so long is gone. Ultimately forever. Sure, I tried finding closure in some way. I wrote countless letters I never mailed. It’s like that song by Carrie Underwood says I said all I had to say in letters that I threw away. I picked up the phone a thousand times and tried dialing his number a thousand more. But each time the words fell short. It’d been so long and it wasn’t easy. It was literally like trying to spin the world the other way…

Our ending had been so messy, so excruciatingly painful that I wanted to make-believe we’d never happened. Except we had. And with the downfall of our relationship, a 10 year friendship was swept away. But I didn’t acknowledge that, not even a little bit. That this person, this lifelong, way before he was my boyfriend, friend was gone. That it was agonizing. That it wasn’t right, and would never be right. Pretending that his taillights in the rain where the last remanence of him wasn’t helping anyone. No, not even myself.

I held the folder close to my chest and began to feel out of breath. I laid back and closed my eyes, pressing my cheek to the floor and waited. What for? I don’t know. To be rescued or found. But no one came. There is something so heavy about the burden of history, of the past. I wasn’t sure I had it in me to keep looking back. Except I had to. I had to retrace my steps and take down notes, and paste lost and found notices to find the heart that vanished.

You can’t just turn your heart off like you do a faucet. You have to go to the source and dry it out, drop by drop. I knew it would take me time to get my heart functioning again. That falling in love again wasn’t even the end game. That it was about me just being okay, content, and serene. I didn’t know what that looked like but I had a feeling it wasn’t lying on the floor reminiscing about the regrets for the choices I’d made. It was out there, where stories broke free from its pages that eventually I would find myself again…