There is a therapy-esque practice that my friend J keeps mentioning to me. I don’t know the specific name of it, but it is a form of meditation wherein you go to see an appropriate person, and tell them the story of your whole life, from start to finish, and do it again and again over time. It may only be my perception of it, but it seems interesting to think about how that story changes over time- the past is not just fixed, but changes as we observe it. It changes as we change.
I’ve been thinking about the past lately. Today I listened to Incinerate for one of the first times since I was really grieving / processing feelings about my last relationship. At the time, I was feeling really bad. My life was starting to turn around, and I was learning how to code, but I would retreat to a room at various times during the day, listen to Sonic Youth, and cry. It got so bad that I cooked and put together a gift in an ill-advised attempt to contact my ex, and was told never to even think about trying to do so again.
What I felt was a certain amount of pain, desperation, and sadness about painful things that I had experienced during the relationship- unresolved wishes, desperate nights, the constant suffering that I saw up close and could not fix. What I felt while laying on a couch in “the Fishbowl”, next to the ping pong table, and listening to Thurston Moore sing about being blasted away in a fiery haze by his emotions was the echo of that first pain- the one that I could not always feel at the time, but brought itself into sharp relief as time and distance made it possible to finally know what had happened.
What I feel tonight is the echo of that echo. The memory of finding my partner with bloodied wrists every few nights is farther away than the memory of the panic and horror I felt in my hallway a year later. Whatever caused me to stare into the ceiling at Codesmith is distant now. The direct memory of being there, being in the interminable series of waiting rooms, psych wards, car rides, sliding scale therapy offices, of apartments of friends and colleagues- it’s not something I can reach out and feel any more. All that’s left is the knowledge that it was there, and the second-order reflections that were experienced on my own. I remember how it felt to be on a balcony in Santorini, crying to Back On the Chain Gang. I remember how it felt to be sad in Athens, and somehow these things have overtaken my direct memories of pain.
When we’d finally parted ways and when they’d made it clear that I wasn’t a part of their life any more, I knew that the day would come that I wouldn’t even be able to hold on to the pain. I can look at the photos now without panicking, but it means that something has also been lost.
The choice I had at the time was to change or to die. What came out on the other side of that choice was a little bit of both.
