| There's this myth going around that somehow we start over. We erase our mistakes, pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, and begin afresh. It's not like that though. Not really. I mean sure, you can leave the vileness and the violence behind, you can reform and improve, but those things -- I don't dare call them demons, for to do so accedes to them too much power -- stay with you, like the faded stain that still marks that old shirt that you used to wear to school and haven't worn in like forever, but still refuse to throw away. It's the memory of crying into that stuffed animal when you came back from school that day and they acted as if it was somehow your fault even though it wasn't, dammit, or the guilt from the first time you were caught stealing, a red-faced and sweaty-palms sort of uncomfortable, like masturbation, but like masturbating with an awareness that the payoff isn't, cannot, arrive.
No-matter how axiomatic they made it seem, it's not about forgiving and forgetting at all -- the blood-tinged spectres are supposed to walk with us, peer creepily over our shoulders, for a good while yet. That's their job. They're not supposed to dissappear immediately, or even with time. We're not supposed to "get over it" like our well-meaning but misguided friends and relatives tell us. The clichés are suppressive pills only. They're no cure, and they don't make you a better person. All they do is make you an asshole with issues.
What matters is the acceptance and the absolution. Only. That's it. "Forgive and forget" is a piss-poor potion that's unhealthy for us because we can't help but try to swallow it literally. In telling us to repress the ghosts, it prophesizes on the ignorance-bliss equation, supposes that the precursor to the equivalence tradeoff can even be attained. Worse, it says that when that self-induced ignorance comes to fruition, we all eat fucking peaches.
Lies. The past that lives in your head is here to stay. From the time that asshat made fun of you in public, to the time you bullied that kid and tried to justify it to yourself even though you knew, and know now, that it was wrong wrong wrong, just like how it was wrong every time that they ever fucked with you because of the jeans you wore, or your hair, or your skin colour or the shape of your eyes. Or like the way that you try so hard never to think about the time you broke those things of hers, even though she loved you and only wanted for things to work out.
It's not about getting over shit. Remember those things. Remember them, and acknowledge your anger, your regret, your indecent apathy in 20/20 digital hindsight. But don't push them into that corner again, don't pick up the pen and stare at the paper and tell yourself that you're starting over, when all that's happening is that you're the one in the empty room, and the room is the paper, and denial the wall.
I don't care how much has changed, or how much is different: those moments, those actions, are a part of who you are now. It's only about seeing them for what they are, or were, and forgiving yourself for having been the person that was there watching and making it all happen. You were a different person then, but life ain't a series of fresh starts, sweetheart. It's a book that you wrote yourself and it's about damn time you acknowleged the role that the early chapters -- as grotesque as they were -- had to play on the story that unfolds now. It's your story, after all. You may as well be aware and fully awake to it all. Even the nasty bits.
It's not about beginnings. The only one there is a limit, and the point being approached is now. Continuity stares back from the mirror.
Don't you forget it. |
