Sweeping the past from the future.

1. I can't seem to stop the sweeping sense of the past from colliding with the fearful future. The past is represented by thoughts of my father, my ex, my past failings, the history of my depression, that sort of thing. The future is filled with possibilities, to be sure, but so many of them seem so overdetermined right now. And I can't tell how distorted my perspective is by loss. Right now, loss is like the lens that I look at life through a lot of the time.

2. But not all the time. This past week, an unexpected eruption of...well, I don't know what to call it, other than a pleasant reminder that there is indeed hope for the future. Unexpectedly, a friend I've known for some years (not the one referred to in previous post) and I have started some impromptu fooling around. Nothing terribly serious, just sex and light S/M play. It feels easy and free of expectations and secrets. I don't see a long-term future for it, but right now it feels really good, joyous and a much-needed relief from the heavy mourning I've been immersed in.

3. Which of course leads to all sorts of questions. Because my last relationship felt like that at the beginning, too - joyous, a relief from so much that had gone before. It felt much more fraught with potential than this, to be sure, and for good reason. This is a diversion. That was life-changing.

So where did it go wrong? When did the joy give way to...whatever it was that it gave way to. Ennui? Frustration? Silences and truths not told on both sides? Digging around in the muck of that is the last thing I should be doing right now, but I feel that I owe the relationship that much, if not now, then at some point. It's obvious to me now that that's how and why I started this blog. Anyway, I feel that the relationship deserves to be taken seriously, because it was that serious, she was that important, we were that close - knowing and understanding seem critical. I won't be afraid to face the truth of the relationship and my part in it. I haven't been yet, hence this site. My plaza of parrhesia.

4. My father's death continues to hit me in seemingly random moments. I bought a bagel for lunch at Noah's Bagels yesterday and looking at the old black & white photos of Brooklyn (where he was from) had me in tears. I can't believe that I'll never get to talk to him again about politics or jazz or baseball - it just seems unbelievable and when it catches up with me, the force of it is stunning.

5. I think I'm a little closer to understanding the way in which the two losses, of my father and my girlfriend, seemed linked somehow. I think they represented the stability of the past and the promise of a future. I had of course known my father all of my life; a simple and obvious fact but one that is so easy to overlook or underestimate. We weren't exceptionally close, but he did form part of the fabric of my life, a shoreline that I always knew was right there on the horizon whenever I was at sea.

And for a long time I thought that my girlfriend and I might be together for a very long time, conceivably until one of us died. At our best, there was a sort of gentle lovingness (ghod, how long ago and far away that feels now) that felt like the sort of thing that old couples talk about. Whenever you hear old couples talk about what kept them together, they always acknowledge that the heat of youth passed long before, but that there was a deeper, gentler love that persisted. I thought for a long, long time that we had that. She seemed to as well, or at least spoke and acted like she did. Maybe she was trying to convince herself - not the same as lying, exactly. And maybe I was trying to convince myself too - there were moments, terrible & terrifying moments when I thought that my love for her might not be enough, might not measure up to some undefinable standard or requirement that I myself had. In other words, that I loved her, but not enough to make it last.

But then the moment would pass, and she'd say or do something that would melt me a little, and I'd put the Bad Thought back in a box labelled Doubts That All Couples Have. And I'd be sure again. Who knows how often she was actually sure.