AbsurdBeats

Twenty five years, a quarter century, almost half of my life—so far away, in so many ways.

I’ve mentioned before that I no longer recognize the desperately self-destructive person I once was, that on those rare occasions I read journal entries from later in my career as a failed suicide I think Jesus, I wrote this? Who writes this?

For twenty years, a fifth of a century, almost half of my life, I berated myself for my life, and in the midst of that fifth I tried, again, and failed, again, to end it. It would be over a decade before I would, finally, leave it all behind.

It’s been over a decade since I left it all behind.

These swaths of time, overlapping and flapping against one another, floating back into and obscuring past versions of myself.

This is the story of everyone’s life, I have to remind myself. Does anyone recognize who they were, then? Who sustains the same line all the way through?

Still, some lines are sustained, if even fictionally. There are pieces of memory I pick up and thread on to the knotted string I call my life, but I can barely remember who I tried to erase and what remains are these odd hard bits that nonetheless are unsettlingly warm in my hand.

Over a decade since I left it all behind, I cannot hold these strange remains for long without fear I will string them all together and back to that long dissolve. And so before I am too warmed I shake my hand and scatter those remains.

And so there are some ways I cannot know today of who I was before.

This is not a tragedy; this may not even be a loss. I wish I could know, nonetheless.