Freed From Memories

I am so much better now than I was only a few months ago.  Instead of spending every waking moment trying to keep a grip of the ledge, I am taking steps away from that chasm I was teetering on for so long.  I know that life exists ahead of me and that there are choices and plans and love and sex and school and concerts and drinking and friends and all of these things that make life life.  But I have a new struggle.  The memories.  It's the memories that threaten the strength of my new legs to keep walking.  I wish I could say this is new, but I have lived in the past and in the memories for a long time.  Doing this has prevented me from seeing and living in life as it is.  I have lived in life as it was. 

While cleaning my house, I found pictures...so many pictures.  Old scars opened a little again, reminding me of good times.  And not just good times with my ex wife, but of the past 20 some years.  There were pictures from high school when life was little more than an open highway waiting to be driven, pictures of college and girlfriends and summer camp when I was in shape.  I dug through photos of Europe and laughing with the woman I would marry and pictures of the day we did and the life we began for the few years that followed.  The memories are what made it so hard to see where I was now, where I had been recently and where I was when it was all falling apart.  I sat in the closet where the albums and the bag of loose pictures were waiting for me and I sobbed from somewhere inside me that had been closed off, somewhere that I thought had healed.
Behind all of the relationships that go sour are those moments that we treasure, those moments that kept us moving forward with the people we have grown to love.  It makes me sad that the pictures are only captured moments that have passed.  I can see the happiness, but I can't reach in and pull it out anymore than I can go back and relive that time.  It is frustrating to think of all of the what ifs that come along with that.

What if I could go back and play basketball in the snow with Jme and make out during Wayne's World?  What if I could go back to BG and drink a pony keg with Mario or tell Dave he can party at my house if he brings the money and the girls?  What if I could dance with Jill again?  What if I went back to being a camp councilor and Hannah and I would have our summers again?  What if I could spend every rainy night running and dancing in the rain and making love in the newly wet grass?  What if I could be in those moments of real happiness forever where things were simple and were only what they were?

But I can't....we can't.  We can't live in the moments that are gone and I don't know if I would.  If the things that hadn't happened as they happened I wouldn't have experienced all of the good that I have.  To trade in those moments we regret and would rather forget would mean we have to trade in many of the moments we wouldn't lose for our lives.  I am who I am because of all of the things I have done.  I suppose that a good thing about the bad times is that we can learn from them making them something else besides just something that we would like to do differently.  

Life is suffering and each moment of adversity is a moment of growth.  Any runner will tell you that the last mile, the mile where every step is pain and every breath burns, is the mile where you grow the most.  Every time you push through and finish is a time that you have gained something. 

I don't think I can honestly say that I wouldn't go back and have another night in college with the guys in my dorm, or that I wouldn't like to have gotten into Josie's bed instead of sleeping on her couch, or that I wouldn't have stopped and taken the time to talk to Hannah before deciding we were done.  The thing that I hold on to is that I have learned lessons I would never have learned otherwise. 
This past year has been the hardest I have ever experienced.  Parts of myself that I didn't even know existed have been revealed.  I blindly walked into experiences, but have come out able to see more than I ever have before.  I relive flashes of moments every day, and each time I can see things that I could have done differently and that I will do differently if faced with that situation again.  As much as I would like to be 25 and carefree (to be read as "blind"), I am not.  I am growing and aging and learning and seeing things differently and I am realizing that that is okay and it is necessary.  I am not trapped in my memories any longer.  I can look at the pictures in my hand or in my mind and laugh and smile at what was good.  I know that there will be more moments like that and that there will also be more moments I would rather wish away.  That is all okay.  I will grow from every moment, good and bad. 
I am not who I was.  I am who I am.